Word: churlish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Perhaps it is churlish to make fun of Miss Alexandria. Certainly the author would never do so. He observes that the virtues of such women, products of pre-tax wealth and protracted social training, are unlikely to survive the times. Fondly, he seeks to preserve their manners and their memory. If Miss Alexandria seems not entirely real except to his eye, what matter? Affection, especially in much of modern literature, is a rare commodity. Like the loyalty of a husband to an unattractive wife, Richter's affection for this Main Street Auntie Mame ends up being somewhat touching...
Director Christian de Chalonge tells Antonio's story in straightforward documentary style, avoiding dramatic climaxes and resisting all the opportunities for easy sentimentality. The casting is superbly unactorish. Churlish hotel clerks, irritated factory officials and the nurse's sleek young friends making banal conversation about the beauties of Portugal-all look their roles and read their lines without a hint of theatrical emphasis or timing. The Portuguese peasants are clearly not actors at all. but no professional performer could hope to match the direct simplicity of their response to the tragedy that surrounds them. Best...
Under the CEP legislation, an instructor has the right to bar pass-fail from his course. Few are likely to be so blunt. "It would be churlish of an instructor to say 'take me 100 per cent or not at all,'" Riesman comments; "I think most can be chided out of such totalism...
Unfortunately, there is nothing royal about Camelot's carious screen version. It has been brought crunchingly down to earth by the churlish touch of Director Joshua Logan. To be sure, the film is a re-creation of the triangled plot involving King Arthur (Richard Harris), Queen Guenevere (Vanessa Redgrave) and Lancelot (Franco Nero), the interloper-knight who gives his rivals at the Round Table their joust desserts, thereby arousing the lady's passions. The King ignores their affair until the appearance of his bastard son Mordred (David Hemmings), who sunders the kingdom with slander and rumor...
Baird stutters and often acts defensively on a rostrum, he is emotional and self-defensive on a radio interview, and he strikes many Harvard students as churlish. Baird knows this. Despite his manner, it's hard not to admire what Baird has done and what he hopes to do. At one point, he handed me a letter from a poor mother in Rochester who had just learned of her daughter's pregnancy...