Word: dourness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...modeled on Sir William Knollys, Queen Elizabeth's puritanical and much ridiculed comptroller. Both Malvolio and Shylock were so richly written, however, that later ages have often found the roles sympathetic and even tragic. Both offer much leeway to directors and actors. Here, Philip Kerr '63 offers a thoroughly dour and self-inflated misfit who deserves the gulling he gets. In this production, not only is he imprisoned in a dark cell as a lunatic but he is actually locked immobile into his bed by an iron grille...
...second day of his crossexamination, the usually dour Mitchell was so jauntily confident that he winked at newsmen as he entered the courtroom, then leaned back in the swivel chair on the stand with all the casual but tough authority he used to exude when he was the President's chief political strategist as well as his top law-enforcement officer. It simply never occurred to him, insisted Mitchell, that Vesco had given the $200,000 in order to get help in his struggle with the Securities and Exchange Commission (which eventually charged Vesco and 41 associates with perpetrating...
John Boorman is always after something new. Much of his work (Having a Wild Weekend, Deliverance) has been a remolding of traditional genres-the musical or adventure film-to suit a more personal, sometimes dour vision. For example, he and Screenwriter Alexander Jacobs transformed Point Blank from an ordinary gangster-revenge story into an essay in gun-metal existentialism and a portrait of Southern California absurdism that is still unrivaled. Zardoz, his sixth film, loses something of its predecessors' fighting trim. Although Boorman excels at expressing ideas through action, too many of them, and too muddled, are tossed...
...various times in his twelve-year rule, South Korea's dour President Park Chung Hee has talked about democracy -but never very convincingly. Last week he left no doubt about his true feelings, angrily cracking down on all opposing voices in the wake of widespread demands for a new, more liberal constitution to replace the repressive one he imposed on the country a little more than a year...
...Nobel last November White remarked briefly to reporters, "I've been threatened with it for a year.") In granting White the prize the Nobel committee no doubt recognized that over the years he has attracted a small but dedicated following of readers who accept his dour outlook and who are absorbed by the ramifications of his cutting-keen artistic conscience. In choosing him in the year of The Eye of the Storm, his ninth novel, the panel also showed a sentiment in favor of the "old-fashioned" novel-that is, a carefully crafted fictional edifice with a full complement...