Word: dickensians
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Charles Spencer Chaplin had risen from the darkest of London slums. His father was an alcoholic; his mother sewed blouses for 1½ pence each. Charlie's great character was a memory of that Dickensian experience, a waif in the tradition of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Comedy derives from the Greek kōmos, a dance. And indeed, as The Tramp capered about with his unique sleight of foot, he created a choreography of the human condition. In classics like Modern Times, The Gold Rush, The Great Dictator, objects spoke out as never before: bread rolls became ballet...
...another masterpiece ?Velásquez's portrait of his assistant Juan de Pareja, for example, was snatched from them in 1970 by a $5.5 million offer from New York's Metropolitan Museum. This Christmas, though, Britons had an art-treasure story with a happy ending that was almost Dickensian...
Resolved to make his sons independent overachievers, Ronnie sent them off to schools 30 miles apart. The separation was insupportable; many Sundays the boys bicycled halfway to share food that Tony had scrounged. The Dickensian experience did little to erode David's spirit. When his father entered him in Sherborne boys' school, scene of the musical film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, David conformed to the image of all-round student for a couple of years, then refused to return. "I went to my housemaster," says Cornwell, "and he said, 'Well, this is the moment of choice; you choose between...
...fashion. While every other part of the female anatomy is singled out for celebration from one season to the next, legs are mostly left to hoof it. Beautiful Legs are particularly badly treated in winter, when they are either stuffed into pants and rendered unviewable or left like Dickensian waifs to battle wind-chill factor through a pinch of pantyhose. When Beautiful Legs complain about this scurvy treatment, they are curtly told by designers to go take a walk...
...other hand, the movie, especially in the early going, is full of good gags - the very idea that handsome Michael York, in the title role, and the diminutive, popeyed Feldman could be twin brothers being among the best of them. It has good fun as well with a Dickensian orphanage and Trevor Howard, as a hearty English squire, who, upon hearing his newborn baby cry, instantly rushes into the room to give the infant a hiding so that early on he will appreciate the value of stoicism. Feldman has a keen eye for the sillier conventions of movie narrative...