Word: cynic
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Thanks to the characters he created, Runyon is best remembered as the sen timental troubadour of that most cynical of all streets. The truth is, though, that Runyon was all cynic himself. By romanticizing Broadway, he was thumbing his nose at the world of respectability that he mistrusted and despised Cold Blue Eyes. "When a prominent citizen gets jammed up with the rules," he once wrote, "there are always a lot of folks ready to turn on the brine for him. But when some bezark that no one ever heard of gets found out, they rush...
...liberalization" urged by Moscow. Though Novotny has purged a few of the most loathed and offensive Stalinists from his government, notably ex-Premier Viliam Siroky and colleagues who were responsible for the show trials of 1952, Czechs have no illusions about the nature of the regime. Says one Prague cynic: "Why don't they just come right out and admit what they are? We wouldn't mind if he became Baron von Novotny and had his estates...
...ultimate cynic is someone who wants to know who was singing backstage while Caruso was mouthing the words. Of course, the ultimate cynic lives in Hollywood. Anywhere else, the star of a musical might reasonably be expected to be a singer. But not out there. When Audrey Hepburn sings I Could Have Danced All Night in Warner Brothers' My Fair Lady, the voice on the sound track won't be Audrey's. It belongs to Marni Nixon, the ghostess with the mostest. A girl with a rubber range, Marni is a redheaded, blue-eyed lyric soprano...
...that McKenna is the picture of humanity wronged. An arrogant cynic, he foments riots in the cell block, insults a priest who offers comfort, and refuses to relate information that will bring him a reprieve. He would rather die than grovel, and the audience feels perfectly willing to let him, even if the mode of death (strapped in a chair before the firing party) seems excessivly unpleasant...
...plays into categories, calling some "black," like Antigone, some "rose," like Time Remembered, others "brillant" (sparklingly theatrical mixtures of the light and dark), like The Rehearsal, and still others "grating"-Waltz of the Toreadors. But everything Anouilh does springs from a pervading and indivisible pessimism. He is a cynic uncongealed: the wound remains open. Abandoned ideals and buoyancies can be seen within. And when he turns on the times, his bite is bitter: "Give us a bit more comfort! That's our battle cry now. All the ingenuity of men, which was harnessed for so long to nobility...