Word: cleavon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...octogenarian rapscallions are evoked in two of the most remarkable performances of the year. Cleavon Little and Judd Hirsch totter convincingly as men whose eyes are blear with glaucoma and cataracts and whose hips are fragile, "like a teacup." Yet they do not milk their infirmities for sympathy. They emphasize instead the odd-couple differences in their personalities and ways of life. As they egg each other on to battle, they also come to know and trust each other. Hence Rappaport is less a problem drama than a kind of love story. Little depicts a man who has survived...
...Rich, the confrontation lies somewhere between a responsibility and a pleasure. (He seems to enjoy a vision of himself and Coleman as righteous cowboys staring down a populace of exuberantly prejudiced morons--like Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles.) Coleman, typically, is more subdued. "I have to be laid back," he says. "What good would it do me to get upset about it?" In the video age, Cowboy Troy can't hide his race, nor does he want to. "I'm big and black, clickety-clack," he announces in the first verse of I Play Chicken...
HOFFMAN: One song, in Jimmy Shine with Cleavon Little. It was a beautiful song. [Sings.] "She's a laaaaady." Yuck. I can't sing...
...DANNER: Cleavon Little played my husband in the play in which I met my real husband Bruce...
...into Kenan's fiction. In the short story Clarence and the Dead, the young title character demonstrates an unnerving gift of clairvoyance: "He told Sarah Phillips to stop fretting, that her husband forgave her for the time she tried to stab him with that hunting knife; he told Cleavon Simpson his mama despised him for tricking her to sign all of her property over to him...he told people things a four-year-old boy ain't had no business knowing the language for, let alone the circumstances around them. All from people dead, five, six, ten, twenty and more...