They don't see Jews, as Oz puts it, as "a bunch of half-hysterical survivors".
Meanwhile, underneath all this aimless, half-hysterical activity, your mind struggles to detect the underlying patterns in the surf.
I darted around, dodging peaks, way out at sea, half-hysterical, trying to keep an eye on Roddy.
Writing in the Telegraph earlier this year, he said: "She was never, in my experience, the half-hysterical, over-emotional, over-acting woman portrayed by Meryl Streep".
On the one hand, the performance moved fluidly, and Rizzi had a knack for picking out small details and making them work: an adroit phrasing at the end of the second movement, or the nimble galloping at the end of a half-hysterical fourth movement.
Israeli society consists, Oz says, of "a bunch of half-hysterical refugees and survivors".
This poor girl is half-hysterical that her mother is collapsed in agony and when the operator asks if her mother is breathing, Elin helplessly responds with something like, "I don't know; I had to come here to the phone!" She then seems to rush back to check her mother's respiration.
All around, twitchers are twitching, ducks quacking, children going half-term hysterical and parents blaming each other for the fact that one of them stupidly forgot to pack the hip flask.
The broad farce and physical comedy of the first half seem less hysterical and eager to please, and the conflicted emotions and encroaching sense of lost innocence in the second half (a pattern followed by many of Mr. Bogdanovich's films) seem more substantial and plangent.
A hysterical, half-clad girl, Jo Anne Belknap, told a passing farmer that someone had drowned.
The subtraction does not turn good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book.
