Word: beaverisms
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Incest is the issue in Louis Malle's new comedy, even though the film manages to reach an ending that has all the simple-minded cheeriness of an updated Gallic episode of Leave it to Beaver. Witness: 15-year-old Laurent Chevalier, shoes in hand, tiptoes into his room after spending the night with a new girl-friend. He freezes when he spots, waiting for him in the room, his two older brothers and his father--whose threatening look demands an explanation for his son's absence. While Laurent is still standing in awkward silence, his mother enters, sizes...
...characters in Dent's stories are understandably something of a letdown. The Fabulous Five, Doc's "companions in adventure and excitement," are said to be "the five greatest brains ever assembled in one group," but they talk ("Holy Cow! That's plumb ding-y!") like the Beaver Patrol on an overnight hike. Dent's villains are far zingier. They have names like Ull, Ark, Var, Zoro, Rama Tura, "The Sinister Count Ramadanoff" and "The Horrible Humpback"-whose hump, by the way, is packed with nefarious electronic gear. One of his nastiest creations is an Eskimo known...
...hated Locustland. Hated the habit of hype ("You're gonna be the new Garbo"), the cult of cute (they tried to change her name to Gilda Christian) and the geniuses in silver ties. Her pages are blistered with portraits in epithet. Zanuck has his "beaver's teeth pronged into a cigar." Skouras is merely an "oxlike package, voice like a child's rattle." Louella Parsons is kissed off as "The Queen Mother at Toad Hall." Marilyn Monroe, "a child with short legs and a fat bottom," wonders innocently: "Who is Thomas Mann...
...POLITICS of the action completely aside, the image is a most appealing one. There's a certain evil tinge to the performance that rings true. For you do learn to be a conman in the suburbs. And while every parent probably envisions their children of the fifties as little Beaver Cleavers. the much more calculating behavior of, say, an Eddie Haskell is probably a lot closer to the mark. To hell with all that Woodstock crap. As Rosen quotes Wilde, "Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know...
...exercise of free speech protected a member of the Christian Church of Beaver City, Nebraska who, "in a becoming manner" and in keeping with "the precepts and usages" of the church, interrupted the preacher to contest a point of religious doctrine. The impromptu sermon was held to be legal even though it caused a commotion in the church. But it was held to be a disturbance of worship for one faction of a congregation to enter a church while another faction was worshipping there and to inform the minister of the rival faction that he could not preach there that...