Word: conrad
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SOMETHING for Everyone follows a predictable fairy-tale formula for its plot: impoverished Countess von Ornstein and her two children are restored to wealth by a dashing adventurer named Conrad in a fable which ends with a grand wedding. The lubricant of the story, however, is sex: sex perverted, sex sublimated into aggression, sex released in libidinal fantasy. The result of Harold Prince's debut directorial effort for the screen is a minor masterpiece of black comedy...
...murder. Angela Lansbury as the Countess von Ornstein nostalgically bewails the passing of "real men"-that stalwart Germanic breed in direct lineage from Attila the Hun and Barbarossa. In a world of "upstarts, the American tourists and plastic dirndls," she craves submission to a genuinely phallic male like Conrad. She also craves money...
...Conrad insinuates himself into the Ornstein family circle first by murdering a groom, then by revealing the Nazi obsessions of the stolid head butler. While sexually subduing both doe-eyed, effeminate Helmut and the Countess, Conrad seduces the unprepossessing daughter of a German magnate. The millionaire and his imbecilic wife want to buy a castle and instant social status. Conrad, of course, sees the connection between their ambitions and the Countess' wish to re-open her decayed ancestral fief, Helmut marries the heiress, though he and his bride aspire only to sexual bliss with Conrad. Conrad himself mercy awaits...
...dominates several of the most clever scenes in the film. Whether insulting her lesbian attendant, or shrieking for fine strawberries, or flamboyantly embracing the quest for money, Lansbury brings to her part the exaggerated theatricality which came off so well in Prince's Mame. After announcing her engagement to Conrad, she takes her fat daughter aside and says: "I was thinking of pink for the bridesmaids, but really, my dear, you do discourage...
Questioning the ability of a small DAS field team to deter the Greek regime from carrying out a few arrests, Conrad said last month, "I never understood the logic of that and I don't still. At the time, I didn't like the idea of Harvard showing either the Crimson or any other flag [in Greece...