Word: backchat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more than four decades, Oscar Levant slew his friends-with insults, wisecracks and backchat. When he died at 65 last week, Levant had become a Hollywood legend: the Oscar that no one could...
...Business and Blackmailers Don't Shoot, and two full novels, The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye. The difference between the two novels reveals an uncomfortable truth. The Little Sister is vintage Chandler. The plot is ingenious and preposterously complicated. Detective Philip Marlowe is full of tough backchat ("Cracking wise," he would call it). In The Long Goodbye, the paranoia and self-pity that engulfed Chandler in his last long work, Playback, are already in evidence, and the prose and characterization are flaccid. Still, this is a rich enough sampling to send any true fan back...
...another question. TV newscasts, after all, are the major source of news for most Americans. Locally produced news shows-75% of the total on the air-were never models of journalistic achievement. The average half-hour report allots only 16½ minutes to news and editorials. Even without backchat or horseplay, the program is little more than a superficial headline service...
...Tristana's success lies in the director's scrupulous ambition. Once he was satisfied with the village atheism of Nazarin or the facile eroticism of Belle de Jour. In his 29th film, he is content with nothing less than the face of Spain. Don Lope's backchat with his comrades is an indelible vignette of the inhuman condition, where the aging pick the reputations of their fallen comrades, like buzzards wheeling over cadavers. In the background hover the symbolic figures of deaf-mutes, youths whose voices, like many Spaniards', cannot be heard. Yet Tristana...
Touch and Tell. In the first groups she entered, Jane felt dismissed as an "uptight Easterner" and got off some bitchy backchat: "You don't interest me as much as I seem to interest you." Loosening a little, she began to make Freudian howlers that commonly afflict the beginner in therapy-as when, pretending to be a mailbox, she blithely announced: "I'm hoping for a lot of good long letters." But soon her antennae told her that she was not the only one out of step. All was not well in the land of touch and tell...