Word: callow
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sexy, vulgar, pungent, and yet achieves moments of astonishing tenderness. Only during sustained eruptions does she lapse into monotony, or look like an actress play-acting animosity instead of feeling it. As the ambitious young prof whose blueprint for success includes "plowing a few pertinent wives," George Segal exudes callow opportunism assuredly. And Broadway's Sandy Dennis slyly interprets Segal's child bride as a sickly amoeba struggling to assert herself among dragons...
...bits of Abbott's inventiveness, but his own method is to linger over a gag until all the life has run out of it. He belabors a drunk scene, overestimates the humor in the plight of Ford's married but childless daughter (Connie Stevens) who browbeats her callow husband (Jim Hutton) into orgies of planned parenthood. There is something unwholesomely prudish about a hip young modern who greets the revelation of her mother's impending event by crying tearfully: "All men are horrible!" The ribaldry of Never Too Late will seem rather unnecessarily self-conscious to many...
...shambling plot follows a callow Parisian bank clerk (Claude Mann) who gets high on beginner's luck and decides to court Dame Fortune at the Cannes Casino. Unfortunately, he meets another dame. Moreau appears, a battered divorcee who has already sacrificed her marriage, her child, and her jewels to the corruptive religion of chance. Gambling is her life, she confesses. "Nothing else gives me as much pleasure. I just need one chip to be happy." To turn her luck, the chip-happy harpy latches onto the clerk. They win big and lose big, make love, win again...
What could be done is what the producers did: they hired Lilli Palmer to play the actress, Jean Sorel to play her callow paramour, and Charles Boyer -that great screen lover of yore-to play the cuckolded husband. In a secondary role, Boyer deftly blends temperament and tolerance to contrast against the beautiful worthlessness of Sorel. But Julia becomes most adorable when Actress Palmer wriggles into character to show all the charm, vanity, insight, ego, witchery and wit of a woman who would rather have top billing than top cooing. Enjoying a last fling at youth, Julia tucks away...
...when Tony's fiancee says tata, and Barrett asserts control of the house, the film gets into trouble. Crucial character changes begin to occur so abruptly that the audience feels cheated. The callow Tony emerges as an alcoholic, displaying a capacity for self-destruction scarcely hinted at before. And suddenly, chillingly, the two men have switched roles. "I couldn't get along without you," Tony whines. And his manservant snarls back: "Then go and get me a glass of brandy-don't just stand there, go and get it!" Another offbeat episode has Tony and Barrett locked...