Word: elan
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That she possessed a worldly knowledge of her subject is evident from the photographs in this charming album. Feline, with almond eyes and "reddish, frizzly, rather African-looking hair," in Truman Capote's recollection, Colette radiated a sensual elan that captured France for half a century...
...Movie Movie is one of timing. Not that there is anything wrong with the way gags are paced within the film. Stylish Stanley Donen, who co-directed Singin' in the Rain and later did Charade and Two for the Road, has seen to that with his usual elan. No, what one wonders is whether after living off its own history for so long, satirizing and parodying the beloved forms of the movies' far-receded golden age, Hollywood can persuade audiences to come out again to share a laugh at lost innocence...
Senior Peter Pembroke Smith, playing at the No. 1 position with the same elan that Confederate drummer boys kept picking up the shredded flag at Gettysburg, shot what is quaintly referred to in modern golfing lexicon as an "Olds-mobile." That is, the freckle-faced Smith rolled home with...
Worse are the lapses that occur in the course of the action. Sellon, for example, mispronounces the word "elan" as "uh-lan." And one of the funnier lines in the play--Wyke's remark of his wife, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz"--comes out, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz." That means, I suppose, that she couldn't get Johann Bach to waltz, either. Moreover, any self-respecting mystery buff can tell you that a "mashie-niblick," that jolly skull-splitter, is a five-iron; Bloomfield ludicrously brandishes a driver. All this may sound like...
...audience applauded so enthusiastically--because, what the hell, those guys worked up quite a sweat, and they didn't drop a line. But "workmanlike" should be the last adjective that Anthony Shaffer's scintillating thriller-symphony evokes. A pity, but all too literally, this Sleuth substitutes "uh-lan" for elan...