Word: bent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...delicacy and the easy smile of a star, Dick Withington is juggling invisible Indian clubs. Up goes his left hand: "16,000." Down goes his left hand and up goes his right hand: "17,000." Left hand again, supple and rock steady: "18,000." His knees are slightly bent, his weight well forward. His voice as he calls off the ascending prices is clear and controlled, the even numbers chanted a couple of notes higher than the odd. There is no trace of strain. He can keep the bidding on this early American cherry oxbow chest spinning...
This is comedy of the funny-peculiar bent, and not so much ensemble as communal. Like Sparrows Can't Sing, Joan Littlewood's delicious pub-crawl farce of the '60s, No Surrender flaunts too many characters, plotlets and reversals of mood but still manages to hold together splendidly. Thank Screenwriter Alan Bleasdale (whose elegy to Elvis Presley, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", played the West End last year) for the film's wild pungency. He is ably abetted by a cast of vet actors and a few odd-jobbers like Rock Star Elvis Costello, who has a funny turn...
...designer pistols. Mauri, who acts as tour guide, is portrayed as a prime example of American capitalism's cruelty to the poor, a man who was ejected from his humble rented room by a rich and heartless landlady who wanted to turn it into a sewing room, a bent but not broken castout...
When President Habib Bourguiba married Wassila Bent Muhammad Ben Ammar in 1962, the Tunisian press called it a "love match." Over the years, the pair had frequent clashes, after which she would depart the presidential palace for extended sulks abroad. One such absence was expected to end early this month on the occasion of Bourguiba's 83rd birthday, but Wassila, now 74, failed to turn...
...Christian leaders promptly blamed the East Beirut atrocity on Muslims, charging that they were acting for the regime of Syrian President Hafez Assad. Across town in his West Beirut headquarters, Nabih Berri, the chief of the predominantly Shi'ite Amal militia, ascribed the Barbir bombing to Christian militiamen bent on revenge. More radical Shi'ites claimed that the Christian perpetrators were acting as "lackeys of Israel...