Word: cynical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There is little doubt in anyone's mind that "Candida" is a clever play, good Shaw. The celebrated cynic has written his barbs into a smoothly flowing story of a woman and her dependents, of a catalyst and its reagents. The development of the story is neat, clean, and vastly amusing...
...story, titled in English, Women Are Like That, is pure meringue. An old cynic named Don Alfonso bets two naive young friends that their fiancées, "the firmest of characters," can be cozened into being untrue. Sure enough, the young blades disguise themselves and, ably abetted by the old cynic and the masquerading ladies' maid, Despina, win each other's sweethearts. The gentlemen's bittersweet despair lasts just long enough to round out an opera, and everybody ends up in the right arms...
Again Bogart plays a cynical, self-seeking neutral in an exotic city where the gallant and the shifty engage in life & death intrigues and a beautiful woman wants desperately to escape through a police blockade. Again Cynic Bogart rises in the last reel to a noble, sacrificial gesture, accommodated by a switch in character that should convince no one but the accountants who added up the script...
...that time, he became one of America's most brilliant journalists, sharpest wits and sourest cynics. His quarry was "conglomerate man . . . a tangled wad of rattlesnakes thawing and reeking in the Spring sunlight." Purdue University's Paul Fatout has uncoiled the tangled temperament of Cynic Bierce in a lively and readable new biography...
...parsons ("bladder-headed sky-pilots") and their flocks: "It is gratifying to observe idiots crowding forward to be instructed in ignorance." He jeered at fraternal organizations ("The Improved Order of Flatheads"), composed A Rational Anthem ("My country, 'tis of thee,/Sweet land of felony"). Like many a cynic, he was an inverted idealist. He railed at corrupt politicos, fought the railroad barons, dubbed Leland Stanford "Zeland Stanford...