Word: clare
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...some point in the filming of Lylah Clare it was apparently decided to turn it into a spoof of those Holly-wooden melodramas about moviemaking, like The Carpetbaggers or Harlow. Perhaps the film was always meant to be funny. On the other hand, perhaps its producers wanted to broaden the humor because the script was enriched with such heady verbiage as "I'll rummage through your soul like a pickpocket through a stolen purse." Or because one way of dealing with Kim Novak's acting is to pretend that it was meant to be that...
...trouble is that instead of being outrageously funny, The Legend of Lylah Clare is merely outrageously silly. The cliches don't click, though they are all there. They include the egomaniacal director (Peter Finch) who tells Star Novak: "You're an illusion. Without me you don't exist." And the tyrannical studio head (Ernest Borgnine) who has monograms even on his toilet seats. And even the lesbian pass-made in this case by Italy's Rossella Falk, whose slinky version of a dope-shooting dyke is the best bit in the film. Director Robert Aldrich...
...talked well, ate well, hunted superbly, and knew every U.S. President from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. The wedding reception of his daughter Clare in 1910 was attended by four members of the British Cabinet, including Churchill, then Home Secretary. It was also attended by several bill collectors, who were seated by themselves in a downstairs parlor. Frewen had, however, paid cash for his daughter's wedding gown. The seamstress who delivered it that morning had refused to accept a check...
...social status. Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder visit "one of the last remaining Old World markers" under the elevated in East Harlem. Gloria Steinem re-creates the years that Ho Chi Minh spent in New York, when he worked as a waiter and laundryman. And a freelance reviewer, Clare Boothe Luce, discovers that John Kenneth Galbraith is a better economist than novelist when she reviews his first novel Triumph, about U.S. fumbling in a Latin American country...
Success of a sort came anyway. As a fellowship winner, Podhoretz attended Clare College at Cambridge University, had a piece of criticism published in F. R. Leavis' formidable literary organ, Scrutiny, and was immediately initiated into a privileged class. Although he knew by then that he would never be a poet, he was flattered to be "magically transformed overnight from a Brooklyn 'barbarian' into 'one of the young gentlemen from America...