Word: fatuousness
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...that surely would have stumped the panelists of What's My Line? He is a spellbinding spinner of stories of his own devising, the practitioner of a craft older than Homer, as old as mankind, that has largely been lost in modern times. Whether he tells about two fatuous bears who are forever pinning medals made of leaves on each other or about the voyages of Magellan, his stories captivate young and old alike. In the past twelve months, he has told his repertoire of 40 tales to 50,000 people from Maine to California, in barn lofts...
...mawkish finale that seems inspired by Who's Afraid of Vir ginia Woolf?, the film calls attention to all of Wertmuller's worst habits. Characters are forever letting loose with faddish and fatuous pronouncements about the connections between love and power. Loud music and pounding drums on the sound track accent the script's most histrionic moments...
...cast cannot redeem. Marian Seldes winces uncomfortably in her pointless role, and Richard Woods cannot enact a plodding, fatuous lawyer without giving a plodding, fatuous performance. Victor Garber coasts fairly pleasantly through his cunning young man role, and Marian Winters twinkles merrily as a psychic spinster, but we can't be allowed to laugh at her performance without another character reminding us that she is "the comedy relief...
Seventy years ago, in The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad described an act of anarchist terrorism as "a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought." Today West Germans, in ordeals of introspection and defensive truculence, are trying to understand the almost autistic fury of their own terrorists. Why should their country-its political system stable and democratic, its wealth distributed reasonably well, its society open and obsessively moderate -have produced the murderous young of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction...
After turning out several fat but never fatuous biographies of famous Britons (Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell) Woman-About-England Lady Antonia Fraser has focused on the topic dearest to her heart: love. The former wife of Conservative M.P. Hugh Fraser-and the current companion of Playwright Harold Pinter-says she loves nothing more than to give and receive billets-doux. To kindle ardor in the souls of her readers, Antonia, 44, has compiled Love Letters (Knopf; $8.95), a tender anthology of 135 amorous notes dashed off through the centuries by lovers of distinction. Sample sweet nothings...