Word: edwardianism
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London last week, Director John Huston gave the go-ahead. The clapstick snapped: The David Niven Story. The cameras began rolling, and there, logically enough, was Niven, clad in an Edwardian velvet dinner jacket, lolling around the banqueting hall of a Scottish castle. Yet, illogically enough, at numerous other sound stages and locations around Great Britain, the same picture is also in the works under four other directors, and starring, variously, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen and a mesomorphic unknown called Terence Cooper. Even more implausible, the name Niven is never mentioned in any of the scripts. What's even...
Died. Evelyn Waugh, 62, Britain's Edwardian gentleman at pen points with the 20th century; of a heart attack; in Somerset, England (see page...
...touch in these books is as light as Ronald Firbank's, but unlike that airy Edwardian, Waugh displays feelings that are as savage as Swift's; and in Black Mischief (1932), a hilarious and still timely tale of emerging Africa and declining England, his feelings find blackly humorous expression: the British hero, inquiring after his British sweetheart in an African town, is cheerfully informed that she was the principal ingredient in the stew he has just eaten...
...SCENE FOUR. Jane Ormsby Gore, 23, daughter of the former British Ambassador to the U.S., and a fashion assistant on British Vogue. Clad in tightly fitted, wine-red flared Edwardian jacket over a wildly ruffled white lace blouse, skintight, black bell-bottom trousers, silver-buckled patent leather shoes, ghost-white makeup and tons of eyelashes, she pops in to a cocktail party, not unlike the one Julie Christie goes to in Darling, at Robert Eraser's art gallery on Duke Street. There she sees Fashion Designer Pauline Fordham in a silver metallic coat, Starlet Sue Kingsford...
...Fascists in their meeting-tent, then rape and murder the sister. The hero escapes to go home to pamphleteer in the cause of tolerance, and to get himself happily married. "The answer to everything," he concludes, is contained "within the magic of reciprocal love." Author Benedictus' discursive, Edwardian elegance of style is amusingly suited to satirizing upper-class pretentiousness, but his Negro characters are simply stereotypes and his twittering wittiness collapses at last into sentimentality...