Word: blimps
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...this time, and that means plenty is going to happen, none of it original. The characters, except for a regulation Blimp (Stewart Granger), are stir-type stereotypes: a bomb-tossing boyo (Mickey Rooney) from the I.R.A., a Little Caesar (Raf Vallone) with eyes that smoke like gun barrels, a twitchy-faced psychopath (Henry Silva) so hipped on homicide that he murders babies when he runs out of adults. What's more, the plot is a weary old war horse: the villainous heroes, who fight at the start to save their own skins, fight to the finish to save...
Died. Nicholas Joy, 80, London-born character actor whose hair turned grey at 22, giving him a half-century to play an all-purpose, Anglo-American Blimp-the lean, mean subspecies-in more than 100 plays and films, notably The Philadelphia Story (Hepburn's papa), The Iceman Cometh (the Boer War bore), sitting in so many stage wing chairs puffing Corona Coronas that he developed phlebitis, occupational ailment of English clubmen; of a heart attack; in Philadelphia...
...that never seemed Dark to White. From it came the Matter of Britain, the lesson of greatness, and White was its subtle sage. Bombay-born, the son of an Indian army officer, he was "a nostalgic Tory" who had little sympathy for Sir Grummore Grummurson, as he called Colonel Blimp's Arthurian ancestor. White did not lament the decline of empire so much as the withering of English virtues commended by 15th century Printer William Caxton: "Chyvalrye, curtoyse, humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love." In an age that celebrates the antihero, the neurotic, the schemer, Tim White argued that morality...
...behest of the governor of Jamaica, a bloodthirsty Blimp named Edward Eyre, British troops slaughtered 500 Jamaican Negroes, some without benefit of court-martial; they flogged and tortured 1,000 others, many of them women and children. The British met no real resistance, did not lose a single man. "Hole is doing a splendid service shooting every black man who cannot account for himself," one officer gaily wrote. "Nelson at Port Antonio hanging like fun by court-martial. I hope you will not send any black prisoners. Do punish the blackguards well...
...clouds picked up in the 1930s, Low's views assaulted the conscience of all England. He created the character of Colonel Blimp, a florid beefeater with a walrus mustache who symbolized British complacency in the teeth of the 20th century's storms. From a Turkish bath, the colonel sprayed his nonsense at a mute companion who looked suspiciously like Cartoonist Low. "Gad, sir," said the colonel, "Hitler is right. The only way to teach people self-respect is to treat 'em like the curs they are." Japan was right, too, in the Blimpian Olympus: Keeping the white...