Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...ferocious lioness. At another, bedded with a banging hangover, she suddenly gets a mad glint in her eye, yanks the lid off her ice bag, dumps the cubes into a highball, gulps it down, grins wickedly. These and a dozen other bits of business are brought off with delicious wit and a berserk precision of gesture that only Bea Lillie among living comediennes can match. Like Lillie, Kay Kendall was not really so much a comedienne as a clown, and her last picture should leave no doubt in anybody's mind that she was a clown with a touch...
...these matters as well as in good wine, roses and birds (he owns 100 parakeets). Thin, balding and scholarly looking, he is as inconspicuous as one of his own characters. But his work closely resembles that of another British expert in horror, Saki, particularly in casual bloodthirstiness and ghoulish wit, and he very nearly equals Saki in fiendish invention. His one complaint: "People miss the humor in my stories because they're so intent on being made to squirm...
...outing! Whereupon the professor brushes a speck of dust from his tweeds, adjusts his rucksack and deerstalker, stamps his stout shoes, grasps his walking stick and casually strolls off-to the center of the earth. Fortunately, he is followed by a Hollywood producer (Charles Brackett) with wit enough to smile at some of the most preposterous pseudo-scientific poppycock ever published by Jules Verne. And so what might easily have been just one more merely colossal ($4,500,000) monster-movie comes off the reel as a grandly entertaining spoof of the boys' book as it was written before...
...need it and not have one." He sneered at a claim of California winegrowers that they have never had a poor vintage year. He declaimed: "The selling of sex [in the U.S.] is at the root of the trouble." But at evening's end, for all his wit, Debater Potter was over-Wellesed by a Union members' vote of 485 to 309, defeating the motion, vulgar hands across the sea and all that...
Children of Darkness is couched in Mr. Mayer's approximation of the elegant, cynical wit which the English Restoration famously bequeathed to the eighteenth century. It is set in an annex to the Newgate jail, where the villains of The Beggar's Opera sang like caged birds. Yet it obstreperously violates a cardinal rule of the genre to which it aspires to belong: the rule that says that no character may be endowed with the ability to feel profound and communicable pain. The picturesque discomfiture and knavery that are familiar and amusing in Congreve and Gay are gradually...