Word: foppishness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...each other and indulge in gratuitous palace intrigues while he ran the country with a free hand. Although the setting is not Versailles, the characters in the play are all part of this glittering, shallow society, where conventions enforce a routine dishonesty, friendship and courting are reduced to foppish displays, and love is overwhelmed with calculation. In this setting we meet Alceste, the misanthrope, who is repelled by all the vanity and hypocrisy he sees around him and doggedly asserts his own righteousness. He is, however, madly in love with Celimene, an incorrigably trivial coquette who likes to play...
This production veers between these two poles. Some scenes, like the tea party at Celimene's house, are brilliantly timed and break up the house. The orgy of mutual sighing and foppish introduction at the beginning of this scene is particularly effective. But, almost every actor has his moments of dull delivery. George Patterson, playing Alceste, says his lines in the most professional manner, but particularly during his extended harangues he does not display a wide enough range of emotion to keep them from being flat and rhetorical. Sarah Hunter, as Celimene, and John Daley as Alceste's friend Philinte...
Although the criteria for choosing those privileged 150 are somewhat dubious by present standards, the 1920 version of a clubbie was not a foppish idiot most frequently found passed out in a leather chair at his club. It was presumed that if your last name was Adams and you were a St. Paul's man, you simply were a cut above the rest. This era was before the days of the self-conscious identity crisis, and if for the first 22 years of your life you were constantly reminded that you were born to lead, you generally led. Witness...
...wail seemed to echo back to the grave of Emily Brontë herself. The latest remake seems to echo back to 1939. The comparison is seldom flattering. In the earlier film Laurence Olivier constructed the role of Heathcliff like a man building a castle. Timothy Dalton, who played the foppish Prince Rupert in Cromwell, now seems less landlord than tenant. He self-consciously melts and struts, breathing hard to signify passion, curling his lip to show contempt...
...named Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) gets sprung from the pen after serving twelve years of a life sentence. "How's it feel to be outside again, Dad?" beams his benefactor at the prison gate. "Don't ever call me that," snarls McCain, who regards his foppish son with heavy-lidded suspicion...