Word: englishman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Englishman here (Kenneth More) is a gentleman's gunsmith who heads west with a reasonable expectation of doing business-where there's gun smoke, they must use firearms. Beyond that, the only thing the man knows about the U.S. frontier is that Jesse James is "a frightful female." He is therefore rather astonished when several improperly dressed individuals with bright paint daubed on their faces begin to circle the stagecoach on horseback, uttering unmannerly cries in a foreign language. Outraged, he orders the carriage to halt, stomps out to give the Indian chief-whom quite by accident...
...story of this encounter soon goes the rounds in Fractured Jaw, but nobody believes it until the Englishman (with the invisible assistance of a spring and lever strapped to his forearm) casually outdraws one of the fastest guns in the Territory. At that instant, of course, he wins the heart of the cutie that's known as Kate (Jayne Mansfield), but to his horror he also acquires a sheriff's star. And so the rest of the picture resolves into a daydream of how easily the West would have been won if the English, instead of mere colonials...
John Betjeman, 52, is a gentle, witty, rumpled Englishman who has been called "the greatest bad poet now living." It would be in character if he agreed with that estimate, although he can be called "bad" only in the sense that his rhymes sometimes jingle like a song writer's and that his subjects are often deliberately homely. Literary bookmakers predict that Betjeman (rhymes with fetch-a-man) will be England's next poet laureate. By last week, his Collected Poems had caused a rush on British bookstores probably unmatched by any newly published work of poetry since...
...people buy his verse ("I don't call it poetry"), and he describes himself as "a passionate observer of the second-rate." Actually, Betjeman observes a great deal more than the second-rate. He has a unique eye for the twilight of changing times, although he is one Englishman who looks neither back in anger nor forward in fear. He is perhaps the sharpest and yet gentlest landscape poet now writing in English, whether he lyrically describes a summer meadow or peers with sane, affectionate exasperation...
Kindly Stygian. Betjeman's nostalgia is for the Victorian past; his heart is in its poor remnants, and he frankly calls himself "a case of arrested development." He was raised comfortably in London, great-grandson of a Dutch-descended Englishman who grew rich on inventions such as the tantalus, a contrivance to keep Victorian housemaids out of the port. Betjeman went to Oxford's Magdalen College, where he detested his tutor (Author C. S. Lewis), failed to get a degree because he forgot to take "divvers" (divinity...