larkish

It’s the kind of larkish story line that “The Good Fight” does like no other show: one that reflects, with a painful accuracy and an utter lack of self-seriousness, the ways that our institutions fail most of us every day.

The 20th-century literary critic Edmund Wilson famously disdained detective fiction, with the exception of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which he loved in part for their larkish energy, praising their “air of irresponsible comedy, like that of some father’s rigmarole for his children.”

But that’s just one of the many delightfully oddball splendors in “The Twentieth Century,” equal parts larkish cinema curio, historical fantasy/spoof and sweeping, loving Canuck-Canuck-joke.

“Ever since Miss America kicked off as a larkish beach publicity stunt in 1921, organizers had been trying to class it up—adding a talent contest, selling war bonds, doling out scholarships, taking up causes,” Amy Argetsinger wrote in the Washington Post in July 2018.

Before long, Sheila suspects that something is wrong with the dress, well before she discovers that the last person to wear it, the model who posed in it for the store catalog, died—in one of the film’s many mischievously larkish details—in an apparent zebra trampling.