Word: canting
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Bertolucci claims to be a committed Marxist filmmaker, but his commitment seems only so much cant when it finds expression only in flags and protest posters. The guillotine in Partner is not a symbol of misogyny, not revolution. Heavily involved in the Theater of Cruelty, one of the Jacobs says, "People believe themselves immortal. We must give them a sense of death." Bertolucci's own beliefs may be showing through in lines like these, as they never do when he echoes Moravia's political sentiments in The Conformist. Last Tango in Paris is pure Bertolucci, written without a source...
Lately, too, there has been a greater range in the newspaper's tone. John Corry's thrice-weekly column on moods and minutiae of the city is occasionally sentimental, but it is fresh, impressionistic reportage. With a welcome minimum of liberation cant, Judy Klemesrud and Deirdre Carmody have unearthed an impressive number of offbeat stories about how women's lives are changing. Lesley Oelsner has done expert law reporting on such complex issues as court challenges and sentencing and the juvenile justice system...
There quickly followed an unseemly scramble to ensure oil deliveries on a purely nationalist basis, an "I'm all right. Jack" attitude that prompted London Times Columnist Bernard Levin to write: "The fact is that nothing in the realms of cowardice, selfishness, cant and shortsighted folly is beyond the bounds of possibility in view of what has actually happened already. The first time-the very first time-that any external strain is put on the Common Market alliance, the ties that bind its members snap. No, they do not snap; the members themselves rush forward to snap them...
...birth, puts them both in a series of cages. As he pursues his life of humanitarian crime, Chuff ponders the plight of men and animals, and very satisfactorily reflects on the loyalties and limitations of the British class system with a clear eye and an absence of rancor and cant that should delight the ghost of George Orwell...
...Edward Mulhare is an urbane charmer, and Paul Henreid's Commendatore and Agnes Moore-head's Dona Ana are all that could be asked. In the title role, Ricardo Montalban is superb, no libertine at all, but Shaw incarnate, with his puritan passion for exposing hypocrisy and cant. If all our minds are freer of the pollution of smug platitudes, it is because Shaw, with his Jovian laughter, helped to clear them. -T.E.Kalem