Word: braggarts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Trumpet-tongued Richard Waring is wonderfully cast as the swaggering braggart Parolles, an exhibitionist in sartorial as well as vocal matters. Larry Gates is a first-rate King of France, and nearly succeeds in making his sick-bed scene credible. Will Geer is a lovable Lafeu, and has come up with some very original and effective line-readings. Aline MacMahon is aptly warm-hearted as the Countess; and Barbara Barrie's Diana is properly wily yet pure. Hiram Sherman has fun with the Sergeant's mumbo-jumbo; and among other commendable jobs are Jack Bittner's Clown (though his most...
Sound Leads to Science. Life in the oilfields was tough. Following each discovery came hangers-on and prostitutes, phony stock promoters, poker sharps, and battling roughnecks. In Bowlegs, Okla. "a tough braggart was cut to ribbons in a knife fight. Instead of seeking a doctor he drunkenly toured the town pointing to the blood pouring from his wounds. Still boasting of his toughness, he fell dead...
...modern classic, Juno and the Paycock is fashioned around characters who escape the last-act curtain and become dramatic immortals like Hamlet, Tartuffe, and St. Joan. Captain Boyle, the strutting Paycock, is a Homeric boozer, braggart and whine. With a sea-rolling gait and a gravelly brogue, Melvyn Douglas makes him an amiably puckish buffoon but scarcely a Dublin Falstaff. O'Casey's Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life...
...moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly...
Khrushchev is a drunkard, a braggart, an atheist, a liar and a barbarian. Where is your sense of common decency and morality...