Word: fatherness
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...piece of Christian theology was written not by St. Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr but by Dr. Seuss. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! - the story of how the Whos joyfully celebrate Jesus' birth even after a spiteful wretch robs all their holiday stuff - portrays faith more meaningfully than any church father or Yale philosopher ever did. Published for Christmas 1957, the book's obvious target was Yuletide commercialization. But its deeper message - don't confuse the accessories of religion with religion itself - seems especially relevant for Roman Catholics like me on Easter 2010. (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world...
...genial bachelor father, the unseen boss of Charlie's Angels, the put-upon plutocrat of Dynasty. John Forsythe's gift as an actor was that he never made it seem like acting - just like being the good-looking, confident, reassuring exemplar of something like American royalty. Just like being John Forsythe...
...small screen was home for Forsythe. He began his series work with Bachelor Father, which ran from 1957 to 1962 on CBS, then NBC and finally ABC. This was one of the few American TV sitcoms of the period not set in the middle-class. Forsythe played Bentley Gregg, a rich attorney who lived in a Beverly Hills penthouse with his teenage niece Kelly (Noreen Corcoran) and a Chinese manservant (Sammee Tong). As unflusterable as Robert Young's Jim Anderson on Father Knows Best, Bentley wore suits that were tailored, not elbow-patched, and treated Kelly's adolescent anxieties with...
...sleuthing agency, was the boss of Angels Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett (replaced in the second season by Cheryl Ladd). Heard only on speakerphone, and seen only from behind, often surrounded by doting babes, Charlie was Hugh Hefner as Philip Marlowe, and the bachelor father of his Police Academy hotties. Forsythe's function was essentially the same as the self-destructing message in Mission: Impossible - to describe this week's case, then get out of the way - and do it with a touch of class and a bit of the rogue. Much of his dialogue was blithely leering...
...superhero than a paean to male teamwork, in the style of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, which itself was a homage to classic Hollywood director Howard Hawks (Air Force, Rio Bravo). Perseus is a man's man; he forges his closest bonds first with his adoptive father, then with his comrades: they face the threat of death together and count on one another's wits and grit to stay alive. It means something when he says, "I'd rather die in the mud with these men than live forever...