Word: coxcomb
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Though Marriage occasionally creaks like a piece of stage machinery, Director De Sica cunningly transforms its back street romance into an earthy, exuberant paean to virtue. Mastroianni's vain, middle-aged gallan-checking the coxcomb at every mirror, sneaking into a little dance of smug self-satisfaction -smacks of the satyr that most men yearn to be when the moon is right. And Sophia has become far too perceptive an actress to squander her talents as a mere prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold. Now wild, now touchingly woebegone, now coolly indomitable, she is Everywoman, Italian style...
...store manager admitted that she's "chicken" and will take both Fanny Hill and its newly published "sequel," Memoirs of a Coxcomb, off the shelves if Monday's court order is against the book...
...sentimental and the morally elevating. From London (where he moved in 1859), Whistler deployed his canvases like troops in this avant-garde campaign. The fury to which he goaded proper Victorians bubbled over in 1877 when Ruskin, the reigning art pundit of the day, wrote that Whistler was "a coxcomb, flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." At a farcical libel trial in which one of Whistler's paintings was displayed upside down and the jury mistook a Titian for a Whistler, the painter won damages of 1 farthing...
...Relapse contains, however, the brightest of his characters, the fatuous coxcomb Lord Foppington. All prance, prattle and fizz, Foppington is far more concerned about the location of a coat pocket than the loss of a wife.† British Actor Cyril Ritchard (Love for Love, Make Way for Lucia) blends a born sense of comedy with a brilliant sense of style. His Foppington is no mere lace-handkerchief dangler, but the eager performer of an idiotic role, with a need and a genius for catching the limelight. Ritchard understands that the key to Foppington and his kind is not an ambiguity...
James McNeill Whistler's stock was going up. Bought from a Manhattan dealer by the Detroit Institute of Arts was the waspish Victorian dandy's famed Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket-the splattery nightscape that moved John Ruskin to a crack about "a coxcomb flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." (Bad Boy Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, won a farthing's damages.) Asking price for Nocturne that year (1875) was $1,000. Price reportedly paid by Detroit...