Word: cockneyism
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...from a 1960s point of view. It is like a reincarnated Thomas Hardy revising one of his tales from the vantage point of films, Freud, space shots and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On one level, this yields an engaging parody of the Victorian novel-with chatty narrator, digressions, subplots involving cockney servants and narrative juggling. The technique also enables Fowles to compensate for some of the Victorian novel's omissions and evasions, particularly that dark side of the Victorian moon, the bedroom...
...Italian Job, he is Charlie Croker, played by Michael Caine with his bag of standard accessories: cockney locutions, drooping eyelids and acute satyriasis. Charlie uses jail the way some men use their country clubs-to make valuable contacts. Though he is a petty criminal, Charlie contrives to rub shoulders with the larcenist laureate of England, an elegant superpatriot of a prisoner known only as Mr. Bridger (Noel Coward). Britannia waives the rules for Bridger, who affects Savile Row threads, dines alone, and stabilizes sterling by masterminding foreign robberies from his cell...
What plot there is concerns a young Cockney soldier by the name of Leslie (Michael Sacks), who is being held hostage by the I.R.A. of modern day Ireland in reprisal for one of their own boys scheduled to be hung in the Belfast Jail. Fortunately for the audience, the soldier is hidden in the midst of a Dublin brothel, which is supposedly so hot the officials would never even suspect it of revolutionary activity. Full of whores, queers, and their fellow eccentrics, the place is a kind of Cambridge city councillor's nightmare of what happens...
...Grand Hotel on wheels swiftly degenerates into a bus of fools, overpopulated with drooling Babbitts and hatchet-faced moms. Humor centers around the foreign John with its mysterious bidet and its waxy toilet paper. A sleazy double-entendre occasionally surfaces, as when the tour guide observes that the cockney word for sausages is (smirk) bangers...
...lion of prides. The mane is wayward and unhatted. The massive head and frame are by Hogarth, the voluminous suit by Khrushchev's tailor. An excess of ergs twitches his head and fingers; the English hair and teeth, the cockney-of-the-walk intonations announce his presence in the densest lobby crush. In the past two years, the New York Times's Clive Barnes has become a public character, the most theatrical and prolific critic since the days of Alexander Woollcott...