Word: fathering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Republicans assembled at a modest country club fund raiser. The tall, poised figure in the Brooks Brothers suit sips beer out of a pilsner glass and chats easily. In a short speech he asserts his optimism about the results in the coming caucuses. But the New England aristocrat (his father was a wealthy businessman and U.S. Senator from Connecticut) turned Texas oilman seemed patronizing when discussing that heritage. Said Bush: "They say I'm a patrician. I don't even know what the word means. I'll have to look it up." He also looks down...
...only one of the four I knew at all well, he being my wartime boss at M16, never gave me an impression of having any serious intellectual interests. I regarded him as just an adventurer, who found in Stalin's very ruthlessness something to admire, as his father, St. John Philby, the Arabist, had found in King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Anyway, his appalling stutter would have precluded any sort of Marxist dissertation: Marx spoken is bad enough, but Marx stuttered would be intolerable...
...Henry that form the entire middle stretch of the movie and well illustrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that "action is character." Together these two actors-one a movie star, the other a little boy with no previous acting experience-create what is probably the most credible father-son relationship ever seen in an American film. As Ted and Billy slowly come to terms with each other, there is none of the cuteness or sentimentality that so often clots movies about parents and children...
Though as angelic in appearance as any child model in a TV commercial, he has none of the self-consciousness that often defeats kids onscreen. When he fights with his father over the dinner table or cries for his mommy in the night, the emotions are not italicized but spontaneous: Benton had the sense to let his young star improvise rather than rehearse to the point of slickness. Henry's character also grows-as he must during the course of Kramer. When Billy and a dejected Ted prepare a French-toast breakfast together near the end of the movie...
That is why, when Joanna finally reappears, it is hard to accept her. The woman who earned affection when she courageously walked out of her imprisoning marriage is now a villain: she wants to take Billy away from the father who sacrificed his work and restructured his life for his son. But again, Benton challenges the audience rather than let it leap to a pat moral position. As Joanna undergoes cross-examination at the custody trial, her virtues ever so slowly reappear. Because she has now regained her selfesteem, she seems better able than before to be a good mother...