Word: callowness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Fonda's entry into a scene is that of a man walking backward, slanting himself away from the public eye." Playing almost any character early in his career, Fonda seemed profoundly ill at ease. It amounted to a compact with the movie audience that he was one of them: callow, inarticulate, salt-of-the-earth, or if need be, soul-of-the-nation. This social squirm served him well, in comic or dramatic roles...
...knight of Robin and Marian, but he passes persuasively from innocence to kingship to the realization that immortality can be won only through a fatal joust with his son and slayer. Cherie Lunghi too closely resembles a Covent Garden flower child to bring Guenevere to mature life, but her callow modernity wreathes Excalibur in later ideals of post-courtly love. Nicholas Clay makes an athletic Lancelot: he could be a dashing soldier of fortune or a knight in stainless steel...
Because the lead actors refuse to spark against each other, East of Eden fails as human drama and even as entertaining melodrama. With any stars, the show was unlikely to have ranked with the best prime-time soaps. With callow Tim and sallow Sam, East of Eden is doomed to scrape Bottoms. -By Richard Corliss
Cope is an ironic name for the town in which almost no one can. Certainly Rick Coulter, the callow, phenomenally endowed local lothario, cannot. Nor can the enraged husbands and parents of his inamoratas. Nor can the bumbling posse that sets out to find a feuding quartet -Coulter, his buddy Mike Arizo, a cuckolded husband and his companion -trapped in the snowbound Rockies. Friend and foe are united, bind each other's wounds, curse as would-be rescuers pass over and around, unaware of their piteous fires and cries. After 41 days in the mountains, only Coulter survives...