Word: clever
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...usual, Bergman includes references to his own previous works--e.g., Maria and her husband plan to visit the Egermans, the eminently bourgeois family of Passion of Anna. Also to be expected are the wonderful Sven Nykvist photography, the clever color design (red for lust and guilt, white for innocence, black for death) and the impeccable performances. But Bergman's characteristic flaws are present as well. Occasionally, a scene becomes annoyingly stylized: Karin looks at that piece of glass for what seems like a full five minutes, and the talk in which she and Maria finally commit themselves is smothered...
Kissinger, of course, was attracted to Sullivan for more cerebral reasons. "Henry likes clever diplomats but can't abide stuffy bureaucrats," explains a mutual friend. "Bill Sullivan is a very clever diplomat." After serving in half a dozen embassies from India to Italy, Sullivan was plucked from departmental obscurity in 1962 by another enemy of bureaucrats, W. Averell Harriman, then head of the U.S. delegation to the Laos conference in Geneva. "It took me just a couple of discussions with Sullivan to realize he was not an ordinary man," Harriman recalls. He made Sullivan his deputy, but several senior...
...naturally dwells longer on his successes than his missteps, but even the latter provide moments of fine humor. Having refused to accept Herriot's expert diagnosis that his cow had a broken pelvis, one stubborn dalesman proceeded to apply an ancient cure used by his father ("A very clever man with stock was me dad"). The cow turned out to be suffering only from loose pelvic ligaments, which happened to cure themselves almost at the moment the useless home remedy was applied. For years thereafter-which the author would be well advised to cover in a sequel-the animal...
...this last tentative objection may be reactionary: we are used to ephemeral contemporary novelists (for example, Updike) who find beautiful ways of circumventing and clever ways to hedge. Rhodes's is a new and highly original kind of realism. We need it badly, but it will be hard to accept without more from the same young writer...
...estate when his wife's lover, a hairdresser named Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), arrives. Wyke proposes a shrewd plot: he will help Tindle "steal" the Wyke jewels, in order to defraud the insurance company. But that, we find, is not quite Wyke's real goal. And, a still later clever-and-bold twist tells us what Wyke really wants is not what he really wants. And in that fashion the games...