Word: gallic
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Becket is a cerebral film spectacle based on the play by Jean Anouilh, in which English history wars with an impudent Gallic wit. Director Peter Glenville has flung the drama onto the screen like a vast Bayeux tapestry, held fast with the lancet-sharp performances of Peter O'Toole as Henry II, England's first Plantagenet ruler, and of Richard Burton as the 12th century martyr Thomas Becket. Henry loved Becket, raised him to eminence as Archbishop of Canterbury, then lost his onetime friend in a struggle between church and state that ended with Becket's murder...
...played-out playboy, Ronet is supremely Malleable. He looks like a Gallic Tony Curtis and pours out the heeltap of his charm like stale champagne. Malle himself must be credited with clever cutting and a well-told tale, but unfortunately he too often vaults from fiction to philosophy, and he has no head for heights. No doubt he is right, if tiresomely unoriginal, when he says that in an anxious age big-city dwellers are too often out of touch with each other and with the fundamental realities of their lives. But the spectator's eyes will probably glaze...
Jaunty old Canon Kir is a Gallic equivalent of the late Fiorello La Guardia-a Napoleon-sized (5 ft. 3 in.) "autocrat" with no inhibitions. In his normal dress of beret, black cassock and high-laced shoes, Kir occasionally descends on the gendarmé directing traffic at Dijon's Coin du Miroir, takes over, creates monumental traffic tie-ups. At the inauguration of a new public school gymnasium, Kir, cassock and all, shinnied up five feet of rope to answer a photographer's challenge. When he found himself locked out of his apartment, Kir stalked back...
...French abstain when they can from their ill-tasting tap water in favor of vin ordinaire, and abhor the ice water that Americans call for. Such Gallic hydrophobia does not apply, however, to bottled mineral water. In the course of a year, the French drink 1.2 billion bottles drawn from 3,000 springs, or 25 bottles for every man, woman and child. By far France's biggest producer of mineral water is Source Perrier, a $79 million firm that has grown so prosperous from its natural springs that it now owns seven mineral water companies, a soft drink company...
...assuage the Gallic gland, French men gulp some 7,000 varieties of patent medicines - notably, Les Petites Pilules Carters Pour Le Foie - as well as treating it to massage, hot baths, compresses, radioactive water, herbs, fasts, purges, exercises, and injections, naturally, of liver. Says an Anglo-Saxon doctor who has practiced for many years in Paris: "I have never examined a Frenchman who did not believe that he had liver trouble." Undoubtedly, the Frenchman's liver takes a worse beating than any other variety on earth, except that of the geese they force-feed for foie gras. The French...