Word: contempts
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John Glover as Dudgeon certainly does his best, remaining comfortable with Shaw's script even when the script itself lets him down. Exuding energy and contempt for the fusty and hypocritical Puritanism of his elders, Glover makes his entrance early in the action with dramatic flair, twirling his cape flamboyantly, strutting around the stage and insulting everyone in sight. Edelman's spitfire pacing and clever use of props, together with Glover's easy stage presence, make this scene--in which the relatives gather to hear Dudgeon pere's will--a comic gem that sets the tone for the rest...
...five days after receiving an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, he was summoned before the HUAC and asked for the names of other writers he had met at leftist meetings a decade earlier. As a result of his refusal to inform on others he was found guilty of contempt of Congress. His conviction was later overturned on appeal, but the experience nonetheless took its psychic toll...
...perhaps no longer of divine grace. Yet this view is at war with an older tradition from which, even in a country that slights history, the imagination is never quite free: whether in the Bible or in fairy tales or in great works of fiction, money is held in contempt. The great callings are not trade or commerce but the state or the military or the church or scholarship. The great legendary virtues are not thrift-and its explosive extension, profit-but courage, kindness, faith...
...what Gibbon calls a "tedious but important" matter: his treatment of religion. Gibbon himself became a convert to Roman Catholicism while at Oxford, and he returned to Protestantism only at the insistence of his wealthy father. By now a thorough skeptic, he speaks of the early Christians with amused contempt. Their martyrdoms were far fewer than religious enthusiasts now claim, he says. And he maliciously derides the church's "uninterrupted succession of miraculous powers, of healing the sick and raising the dead." Gibbon sees little if any progress when the early Christians "finally erected the triumphant banner...
...daring, the reckless bravado of his work simply overpowers everything else on the screen. You groan, you shake your head, you laugh wildly at each new lunacy, but you cannot help being fascinated by the man. In the gloomy middle years of his career, he used to demonstrate his contempt for the medium by giving the smallest part of his talents. Now he has apparently decided to give too much, to parody himself. His work in Missouri Breaks is not so much a performance as it is a finger thrust joyously upward by an actor who has survived everything, including...