Word: alec
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...Pacifist Leader Helen John warned, "If there's a war, we won't be able to debate again in 50 years." But they jeered when she called Britain "an occupied country" because of the U.S. military bases there. Conversely, they applauded when former Prime Minister Lord Alec Douglas-Home said, "I am fearful when I see unilateralists sending out signals to a dictatorship that is mobilized with enormous armed forces and practices its doctrine in Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan and Poland." Home and Beloff carried the day. showing that, at Oxford at least, pacifism...
...Lovesick, which opens on Feb. 18, Moore is a middle-aged Manhattan psychiatrist who falls in love with a nubile patient and finds happiness under the ironic eyes of Sigmund Freud's fantasy-ghost (Alec Guinness). The film was written and directed by Marshall Brickman, who collaborated with Woody Allen on the screenplays of Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan, and it has many of the funny, arch touches of Allen's best pictures. The early scenes, particularly, in which a motley group of patients pass through Moore's office, are hilarious, knowing satire at its best...
This said, one must still allow for that rarest kind of consistency that is neither funny, dull, hazardous nor stifling. Call this the sublime consistency, which, instead of delimiting the truth enhances it - the consistency of an Ella Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire, Alec Guinness or Isaac Stern. But then, life itself has been inconsistent in producing such consistent pleasures. And once in a while, a consistency comes forward that is both sublime and foolish, that of Don Quixote, for instance, who mounted his premise and stayed the course, eventually proving less mad than inspired...
...THEIR ART, the English have always had a knack for electroplating the basest metal with silvery gentility and presenting it like the finest tea service. This wonderful alloy of nastiness and reserve is the stuff of such typical British products as Alec Guinness classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, Agatha Christie's drawing room whodunits. Monty Python, and Evelyn Waugh, Brimstone and Treadestems from this tradition of black comedy, but departs from it by crossing over the boundary between laughter and darkness once too often. The result, while disturbing and thought-provoking, is ultimately unsatisfactory...
...Favorite year teeters on the edge of mediocrity, but Peter O'Toole more than rescues it in the end. He merges seamlessly with his role like Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness used to, and could very well join their august company if he continues to develop as he's doing now--into a British comedian in the grand old style...