Word: florid
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Based on a florid Joseph Kessel novel, The Horsemen concerns a master Afghan rider named Uraz (Omar Sharif) who enters the game of buzkashi to assert his manhood and prove himself to his stern and demanding father (Jack Palance). Buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanistan that seems almost medieval in its ferocity, is a considerable test. Contestants ride fiercely against each other, struggling for possession of a headless goat that they must carry twice around the playing field before depositing it at the feet of their king. In the unrestrained fury of the competition Uraz breaks a leg and loses...
...movie's zenith is reached in the closer. A florid father, despite misspelled names on matchbooks and overcharging musicians, is trying to give Daughter Mimsey a first-class wedding. Mimsey gives him a first-class crisis instead: she refuses to come out of the bathroom and go to the altar. As the afternoon degenerates, the bridled father's assaults on the bathroom door leave him and his cutaway looking like Salvation Army rejects. His face a frieze of capillaries, Matthau ultimately makes King Lear seem a whining serf...
...latter '60s, romanticism became "camp." Old movies were appreciated because the emotion was behind glass, and confined to a 20-inch screen. On that scale, a kid could safely dig Bogart's telling Sam to play As Time Goes By without being accused of emotionalism. Sentiment, no matter how florid, was permissible if it was ancient: westerns, turn-of-the-century valentines, revivals of theater period pieces like The Front Page or Harvey (preferably with period stars like James Stewart and Helen Hayes). Novels could be as old-fashioned as Silas Marner, provided that they shared the joke with...
...released film is perhaps not so tightly conceived as last year's La Femme Infidele -but it may also be this director's funniest thriller. As usual, the story deals with murder and the way murder changes complex human relationships. The color (particularly the late-Hitchcockesque blues) is more florid than ever, and there are two scenes that can only be described as amazing: one involving a dinner at a bourgeois French family's home, the other featuring the carving of a duck...
...album is calculated to appeal to the believer in ghosts and seances and such. The front shows a sort of slimy, ectoplasmic quill pen writing music, and the back has a "quote" from Sir Donald Tovey about composers who "have shuffled off these mortal coils." This remarkably florid pseudo-Shakesperianism was allegedly transmitted last January by Sir Donald from beyond the grave. Tovey was never a great stylist, but even he never sank that...