Not enough good one-liners crop up, but there are amusingly mad sight gags, to be sure, in Stanley Kramer‘s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). And I respect that it’s full of plot and detail—far from indifferent to these elements—and that its cast is, well, largely appealing.

Spencer Tracy is creditable but Sid Caesar is a farce artist not at all uncommanding or charmless, which is practically the case with Terry-Thomas too. Ethel Merman is funny and means comic business while Edie Adams—inadequate in her acting—is at least fetching. And she has more life in her than Dorothy Provine does.

The screenplay is by William and Tania Rose. Theirs is not a great comedy, but they’ve given Mad what most great comedies possess: a certain sadness behind the hilarious occurrences.

The film 1900 (1976), by Bernardo Bertolucci, is a long and high-budget Italian period piece. Its cynical vulgarity and ugly inanity drove me to stop watching it after two hours and nine minutes.

It’s the kind of film a sexual liberal of the Seventies would put out. Two boys talk about their exposed penises. As men they are in bed together with one (prostituting) woman. An aging landowner instructively exhibits to a girl of about fourteen a member that will ever be non-erect. Had enough sex stuff yet? In themselves only one of these scenes is artistically bad (the two boys), but all are part of an offputting two-hour whole. The nine minutes beyond the two hours I saw were stupid (why is Robert De Niro so passive before Dominique Sanda?) I don’t regret not finishing 1900.

Stalin does not respect you, Joe Poet. He is willing to torture and kill you. You’re Jewish.

Another piece from The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, Nathan Englander‘s “The Twenty-Seventh Man” (1998) owes its existence to Stalin’s anti-Semitic oppression in the Soviet Union. Four Russian literary artists, among twenty-three others, are arrested and destined to die, because they are Jews. “We’ve lost our universe, this is true,” one of them says. A young man named Pinchas represents the artist who is snuffed out by a sinister world before he is known and loved.

A terrific story, this. Englander writes wryly and knowingly. His dialogue is delicious. John Freeman opines that this is a tale about the madness of “a state at war with truth.”