Word: brilliant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is nothing unpredictable about Bob Fosse: this gifted director-choreographer has shown the same strengths and weaknesses throughout his stage and film career. As a showman, he has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone. Too often Fosse insists on fusing entertainment with superficially conceived Big Themes. Certainly musicals have a right to be serious, but Fosse's song-and-dance flights into the metaphysical are less illuminating than...
...story. Ordinarily, the ultimate company man might agree. But behind homicide Smiley detects the ruthless spirit of Karla, his longtime adversary in Moscow. Publicly accepting the injunction of superiors, Smiley decides to do a little freelance investigation. On the scent from London to Germany he encounters a brilliant cast of characters from previous enterprises: Connie, the sapphic Soviet expert whom the Circus has dubbed Mother Russia; Oliver Lacon, the icy intelligence chief whose marital distress parallels Smiley's; the estranged Ann, still Mrs. Smi ley, and still destructive; and, ultimately, Karla himself...
...Sylvia followed him three years later, leaving the play wright as her boys' principal guardian. His care and kindness could not be faulted, but no indulgence could save the doomed family. George, the eldest, was killed in the trenches of World War I; Michael, the most brilliant, drowned at Oxford, possibly as the result of a suicide pact with another student; Peter jumped in front of a London subway train in 1960. As Birkin unfolds the darkening drama, his book becomes a psychological thriller. The biographer's own style is self-effacing, and he is content...
...McNulta had tucked inside his bottle a set of newspaper clippings which breathlessly detailed the "Grant boom," complete with Grant buttons and cheap portraits, that struck Chicago during the popular former President's visit. The clippings described how the ladies wore their new diamonds and court trains to "brilliant" receptions, and imaginative pickpockets plagued the crowds that swarmed to town to see the electric illuminations. Evidently McNulta agreed with the newspaper that said: "As the hours passed on, it became more and more evident that this was really to be Chicago's greatest...
...last major hurdle in the quest for a truce was achieved by a formula that made subtle concessions to both sides without spelling them out in detail. It was cobbled together in a brilliant, behind-the-scenes piece of diplomacy by Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal and a group of British Foreign Office aides. At a three-hour meeting Tuesday night with Nkomo and Mugabe, Ramphal and the guerrilla chiefs examined each line of the deadlocked cease-fire proposals until a reasonable formula was found. Then they called Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere, who is chairman of the Presidents...