Word: callow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With the exception of one callow actor, the picture's youngster is Kirk Douglas, 54, playing with an outrageous auburn hair rinse and grinning like a Steinway with 88 white keys. He and the rest of the over-the-hill gang try to bust out of a federal pen presided over by Warden Henry Fonda, a lame graybeard with advanced ideas about penology. These notions are the only flickers of intelligence in the film...
...with how he got this way and how he views himself, the people he knows, the universe he inhabits. Gardner adroitly uses the device of alternating two manuscripts: Agathon's disjointed writings in jail, and those of his cellmate and disciple Demodokos (whom he insists on calling Peeker), a callow youth who manages to be devoted to Agathon despite being disgusted and enraged by his antics...
...make that callow and ridiculous statement that you have the audacity to put between quotation marks. " 'Now if I were Norman Mailer,' said the author of Portnoy's Complaint, 'I'd be up in the ring after the first bout, kicking away at the boxers in golf shoes.' " Whatever tin-eared fantast fed you that one should at least have told you to include in your story the fact that in Thailand the boxers fight principally with theii feet. As it stands, the quotation is not only predictably without any relation to fact...
...leads in this production were peculiarly excellent. Karl D'Challa Deirup seemed at first just a bit too mature as the callow youth, Nanki-Poo, but his first song ( A wandering minstrel I/a thing of shreds and patches... ) established Nanki-Poo as a totally different character from that of the traditional interpretations. Alan Abrams, as Pooh-Bah, the Lord High Everything Else, was marvelous as the proud but corrupt political hack. But the undisputed star of the show was Josh Rubins, as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner. Following the opulent train of reverent courtiers, he wore a ludicrous robe...
COMMUNISM, in Buckley's thinking, was a clear and present danger against which all rightists should unite; and in that schema socialism was, in the hands of callow liberals, useful to communism. Unstated but implicit in such thinking was the assumption that communism was the major threat to human freedom, and that some sacrifices of freedom and comfort and safety were necessary to defeat the red menace. That which strengthened America, even if collectivist, could be rationalized as good; that which weakened America, even if fulfilling of individual freedom, was bad. Many Buckleyite conservatives held these beliefs, not necessarily...