Word: flea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...late-teen-age hero (Alan Arkin) wants to be an actor, an exotic ambition that sends flutters of horror through the hearts of Papa (Marty Greene) and Mama (Sylvia Sidney), who want him to be a druggist. His perils and pratfalls as he develops his dubious talents in a flea-bitten acting school run by a haughty, boozed-up impresario (Alan Mowbray) and his daughter (Vivian Elaine) make for broad, boisterous fun. With his syrupy delivery, chipmunk facial grimaces and gift for lighting his own finger instead of the leading lady's cigarette. Arkin is a clownish glossary...
...than the spoken cliche, so that The Beauty Part sounds as if it were printed on the stage rather than performed on it. Parody is, at best, a parasitic form, no stronger than the host body it is fastened to, and in this case the host is junky novels, flea-brained Hollywood scenarios, self-help journals, and ad jingles. Pop culture is turned into pop parody, and the fun runs thin...
...flea...
Status Symbols. As a shopping center, Tirana looks like a flea market somehow expanded into a town. In the almost completely nationalized shops, a shoddy suit costs 7,000 leks, $140 at the official exchange rate, or a little less than twice what a laborer makes a month. Attempts to industrialize Albania ended abruptly when Moscow abandoned its half-finished embassy, pulled out several thousand experts last year. The country's only large cotton plant was idle for three months; blueprints for new factories faded on the drawing board. Of the 22 Russian MIGs in Albania last year, only...
...Hollywood did not have Gregory Peck, it would be madness to think of converting this novel into a movie. Alistair MacLean's heroes are not only larger than life-they are a sort of flea's-eye view of the Colossus at Rhodes. An earlier book that MacLean sold to the movies was The Guns of Navarone...