Word: dourness
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...Britain's dour Field Marshal Douglas Haig in World War I who confessed he never went to the front lest the squalid horror of trench warfare diminish his will to send armies to their death, an act he thought not only necessary but inviolable...
...alive and still fighting, Arafat smiled broadly and spoke as boldly as ever. When reporters asked him about his bandaged hand, he said that he had injured it slightly when he fell down some steps. But despite the brave performance, the P.L.O. chairman's prospects were dour indeed. Baddawi, the last of the Palestinian refugee camps loyal to Arafat, had been overrun by P.L.O. rebels backed by Syrian troops, tanks and artillery; the end of Arafat's long rule as head of a more or less united P.L.O. was at hand...
Even in its horrendously truncated U.S. version (some 40 min. have been cut), Possession is a more engaging movie than it has any right to be. Zulawski's images are attractively dour: gray and brown, with the only assertive color an occasional shock of blood red. Adjani is a sullen ravisher, gorgeous and half bonkers. Like the movie itself, Adjani has the power of her pretentiousness...
Last week, after his first postwar leading part (as Shakespeare's penn'orth king, Richard II), Alec had London's dour critics giddily tapping their umbrellas. The Daily Herald: "This is Shakespeare done in a way that gives luster to the English theater." The Daily Telegraph: "Admirable economy . . . not a touch nor a tone seems wrong." The consensus: Alec Guinness is the most versatile new actor to appear on the British stage since...
...Bresler maintains that the only connection is wish fulfillment. Maigret, with his equanimity, his intuitive sympathy for others, his fidelity to one woman, is the man that Simenon never could be. Less plausibly, Bresler attributes Simenon's "stunted sexuality" to his rejection by, and rebellion against, the formidably dour widowed mother he left behind in Liège. (When Simenon was 62, she defiantly returned all the money he had sent her for 40 years.) This purports to explain both too much and too little. As for how Simenon was able to write as he did, what demons drove...