Word: awkwardness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lady in a Cage. A power failure. In an elegant old mansion a self-service elevator stops suddenly at an awkward level between floors. In it, mildly startled, stands a middle-aged woman with a book of poems in one hand and a Lowestoft jar in the other. "Don't worry," she reassures herself. "This can't last more than a few minutes." But it does. It lasts all day, a day of wrath that changes a cultured woman into a caged beast and adds Olivia de Havilland, now 47, to the list of cinemactresses (Bette Davis, Joan...
Ultimately, a production must convince the audience that they are watching people not a play. Julius Caesar fails in this respect. The awkward grandioseness of the production continually draws attention away from the dramatic tension between the characters, leaving a Caesar which is long on spectacle but short on life...
...slight, polished pieces in this latest assembly of Alberto Moravia's fiction illustrate one of publishing's awkward truths-that while there is a good deal to say for the short story, the short-story collection is a bestiary that should not be. Not that the stories are bad, but that they resemble each other like so many peachpit monkeys...
Embarrassed Presence. In Melville's defense, the lines are not all that bad (although some are worse). The average gets better-the book is arranged more or less chronologically-until occasionally whole poems are free of howlers. Still the reader finds Melville awkward and even embarrassed in the presence of poetry, as if poetry were attended by a duenna and not a muse. His enormously long philosophical poem Clarel, which is excerpted here, is a sober, jointy affair in which pilgrims clatter painfully about the Holy Land thirsting after truth amid the waterless cantos...
...right Streisand is the compleat clown, psychologically foiling the world by supplying her own banana peels to slip on. Her face is a choppy sea of doubletalk, and her talk tries to take back what her face just said. She is an anthology of the awkward graces, all knees and elbows, or else a boneless wonder, a seal doing an unbalancing act. All her devices are attention-getting devices and point astutely to the gnawing doubt of self at the heart of clowning. Barbra Streisand could be a gawkish version of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, except that...