Word: charming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...wrong, Hot Millions is not an ugly movie. Director Eric Till manages to capture the non-ugly features of his characters and the charm of the middle-class London settings. (And he does it without resorting to the gratuitous flashiness of a Norman Jewison work). The jokes provided in the Ustinov-Ira Walach screenplay are unfailingly gentle, and, in the case of some bits involving Robert Morley and Casar Romero, quite funny. What the film lacks in physical beauty and glamour, it replaces with humour and heart. I'll take two inarticulate bumblers falling in love while their dinner burns...
...intractable grace. The severely controlled lyricism and hieratic sonorities of the Stravinsky Mass brought me to reflect on the decline of Western monisms into a congeries of mercanto-ecclesiastical hoaxes. This work could well be the last great Mass ever written. The Society's performance possessed a certain Antarctic charm completely devoid of devotional feeling, but was plunged into obliquy by mispronunciation in the Kyrie (Keer-eiyeh) and the sinusoidal vibrato of the soprano and alto soloists in the Gloria. The choir plodded through the long Credo with sacerdotal vindictiveness but decided to clear up its wooly tone...
Which is not to detract from the reputation or charm of Jacqueline Onassis...
...replay of Plimpton's adventure, presumably aimed at the millions of armchair quarterbacks who spend every Sunday afternoon in the fall glued to the pro games on TV. As a film, unfortunately, Paper Lion has all the interest of a five-yard penalty; it sadly lacks both the charm and sensitivity of the original...
Vladimir Nabakov, like Joseph Conrad, is a foreigner who has become one of the most important stylists in English; but, unlike Barth, he deals with human beings, not metaphysics. The charm, for instance, of the novel Pnin (included in its entirety in Nabokov's Congeires) comes not so much from the telling of the story as from the character of Pnin, a hapless professor of Russian in a small American college. There may be no real separation between style and content, but Nabokov uses his style to create a believable man, charming and pathetic. Having just fallen down a flight...