Word: frail
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Steve Martin has a face straight out of a 1930s B movie: smooth, smiling, with regular features and a subtly oafish flair to thejawline. Jessica Harper is frail, frazzled, wide-eyed and sad-mouthed in the '30s tradition of soiled ingenues. Bernadette Peters looks like the offspring of a Kewpie Doll and a Munchkin. Christopher Walken's face is a gigolo's death mask: the character lines have been ironed out, leaving only the dry-ice eyes and the knowing pout. As icons, these four performers would seem perfect for the bittersweet revisionism of this musical drama...
...some of the old salts gathered last week in Groton, Conn., to witness the commissioning of the U.S.S. Ohio, the U.S.'s first Trident nuclear-powered submarine, the occasion was tinged with sadness. Standing before them was the frail but still forceful Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the man most responsible for the Navy's nuclear fleet. Only days before, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, 39, had recommended that Rickover, 81, now Deputy Commander of the Navy's Sea Systems Command, retire after 59 years of active duty...
...Tracy role if Spencer had lived a dozen or so more years. Norman, after all, possesses the hearty irascibility that Tracy seemed born with, and that Fonda achieved only in the making of On Golden Pond. At the beginning of the film, as Fonda lumbers about in gusts of frail menace, he angles toward playing a New England Lear with overcareful pungency. One gets the sense of Fonda's working hard both to convince the viewer that Norman is one ornery old sumbitch and to distance the character from the person we believe we have come to know as Henry...
...next month, Astaire and three other elderly gents (Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) swap spooky tales. The oddest might be the one about Fred's rise to stardom. Fifty years ago, it was difficult to spot a potential movie star in a body that photographed small, frail, bewildered. Fred and his sister Adele had danced through hit Broadway shows for a dozen years before Adele's marriage to an English lord, but to a movie mogul their stage success could be attributed to snob appeal and second-balcony myopia. In close-up Fred looked...
...Wolfe speciality. He is the leading debunker of our time. You like modern painting? Well, you are wrong because modern painting is all theory and no substance. Such was the message of The Painted Word in 1974. You liked the astronauts? Well, you are wrong because they are frail, neurotic humans like the rest of us--the message of The Right Stuff, 1979. And now, Wolfe has passed the word that we are wrong if we liked any building in the Western Hemisphere constructed after World War II--a few Miami Beach hotels and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright...