Word: butler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Anthony Hopkins is Stevens the butler, the old bulldog of Darlington Hall. In the thrust of his Churchillian jaw one can read a declaration of honorable purpose; in his blue eyes one can hear the quiet bark, feel the dogged bite. Stevens lives to serve his master and to rule the servants. Upstairs his step is tentative and his eyes aim for the carpet. Downstairs, as Chairman of the Board, he has a sturdy stride and an imperious gaze. He knows his place all too well. He believes it his job to hear nothing while above, to surrender...
...Nazis; and the late '50s, when ! Stevens seeks out Miss Kenton in hopes she will return as housekeeper and, perhaps, something more. In his own ornate, unknowing words, Stevens condemns himself as the English version of a "good German": a man who disappointed Miss Kenton, his father (an aged butler), his country and himself in blinkered devotion to duty...
This time Ivory and his longtime colleagues have gone their source one better, or one quieter: the film is even more discreet, more Stevens-like, than the book. They have withheld the revelations of tears and admission of heartbreak that finally clatter around the butler like broken Wedgwood. Here, Stevens will never wake violently from his reverie of duty served; he will be trapped in Darlington Hall like a bird that can't find an open window. So the filmmakers have dared believe that the audience will detect these domestic cataclysms in the performance of the man who plays Stevens...
...into the larger picture: the glamourization of lawbreaking as economic hard times hit; New York City as a laboratory for the new relationship between Washington and local government. The people interviewed are not, by and large, major players but ordinary folks -- former sharecroppers, union organizers, journalists, a White House butler. ( PAUL EDWARDS, HOBO, reads one onscreen identification, surely a TV first...
Molly Woodroofe, Yale (Fr., F) Butler, Penn...