Word: bravura
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bravura Style. TV, in short, has brought a new and gripping dimension to war. Combat in living color is often wanting in perspective but rarely in impact. Neither those who control TV news nor those who watch it can fully determine its effect, except that it hits hard at the emotions. During World War II and the Korean conflict, Americans were largely left to imagine for themselves the scenes of war as recounted in the often melodramatic reports of broadcasting journalists. In the early days of the Viet Nam war, the carryover of this bravura style was evident...
Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was a daredevil racing driver and America's World War I ace of aces, later applied his bravura to business when he took over Eastern Air Lines. He survived a dizzying number of auto and plane crashes, one of which led to his spectacular 24-day nightmare in a rubber raft in the Pacific in 1942. Unfortunately, Pilot Rickenbacker's prose does not fly; it won't even roll. The irascible old individualist makes his life sound dully plausible...
...roll up my sleeves." Thus he developed a stereotype of the cinema dancer that endured for more than a decade: an ordinary chap in sports shirt, ballooning slacks and white socks (to draw attention to his feet). His style was virile, breezy, and charged with a lusty bravura, whether he was splashing through a Technicolor rainstorm, kicking up his heels beneath the Eiffel Tower, or skittering across Manhattan stoops in his Navy whites. Though his singing voice sounded like someone gargling pebbles, he projected an easy grace and wit that made him the most sought-after song-and-dance...
...finish were the qualities prized by the academicians. Manet settled for a painting "if it only presents a suitable arrangement of patches." And the impressionists who followed him agreed. He could become as engrossed in still lifes as in a tumultuous battle scene, investing neither in sentimentality nor romantic bravura. He sought to bring to nature only the brilliance of his brushes. By so doing, he brought a new realization of art as form rather than commentary, a fundamental concept that artists still attempt to follow to this...
...plot demands nothing of audiences except that they remember the definition of a tontine, a sort of lethal lottery: the families of 20 English youngsters each invest ?1,000 in a fund, and some 80 or 90 years later, the last survivor takes all. Two brothers, played with tireless bravura by John Mills and Ralph Richardson, are the champions of longevity, and their efforts to outlive each other lead to a hilarious family reunion in which Mills tries to do away with his sibling by poison, stabbing, strangling and flying crockery...