Word: frenchness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...confusion that occur when two families who don't know each other and who have, to say the least, conflicting values, meet for dinner. Their aim is to cooperate in a civilized manner in the marriage of their only children. The girl's father is a French politician noted for his devotion to an organization known as the Union of Moral Order. It is supposed to rescue traditional standards from their assault by wayward modernism. The boy's father (Ugo Tognazzi) is a homosexual. But not just any ordinary homosexual. He is the owner of the nightclub...
...what really makes the picture work, beyond the expert playing of Tognazzi and Serrault and the deft construction of the plot (adapted from a classically well-built French stage farce), is the attitudes - or, rather, lack of attitudes - of all concerned. The film accepts the gays as generously as it accepts the girl's rectitudinous parents. Though the gays must make eccentric adjustments to the exigencies of living, their behavior is viewed as no more unusual than the quirks everyone develops to get through the day as pleasantly as possible. Given a little good will...
...while Sayers (1893-1957) is famous primarily for her detective stories, Lord Peter was only one of her literary products. A medievalist ("I am a scholar gone wrong," she once remarked), she translated Dante and several early French epics. She wrote feisty essays on the decline of the detective novel, the proper use of English, and, in Are Women Human?, male arrogance: "I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction 'from the woman's point of view.' You might as well ask what...
...eccentric, private and opinionated ("Everything she said was a statement, almost an edict," a friend testified). Her minister father began to teach her Latin when Dorothy was barely seven. Her talent for languages lingered: in 1915 she took first-class honors at Somerville College, Oxford, in modern and medieval French. There followed a period in which, as Hone prudishly puts it, she "realized the promises of physical sensuality." After two failed love affairs and an illegitimate son (whom she placed with a country cousin), Sayers married Atherton Fleming, a badly wounded war veteran. She wrote detective novels to supplement...
...most popular brand in the U.S. is Perrier, a French import that comes in an elegant tear-shaped green bottle. Says Patrick Terrail, owner of Ma Maison in Los Angeles: "Perrier has become a cocktail in its own right." For the thirsty cosmopolitan there are also Contrexéville and Evian waters, the two bestsellers in France, West Germany's preferred Apollinaris and Gerolsteiner Sprudel, and Ferrarelle, one of Italy's favorites...