Word: gallic
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Published this week, Winnie Ille Pu proves to be a Latinist's delight, the very book that dozens of Americans, possibly even 50, have been waiting for. For the weary pedagogue, home from The Gallic War, it provides surcease of solecism and a welcome chuckle. It might even make a suitable Latin text in a progressive school...
...such a fribble, treatment is everything, and the man responsible for that is Director Philippe de Broca. who never before made a movie on his own and now emerges as the biggest comic talent of the new school of Gallic cinema. Considering his youth and inexperience, De Broca's technique is startlingly mature. He has a frenzied flair for sight and prop gags, but he never lets them disturb the deeper humor of the scene-many moviegoers may for instance fail to observe that the painter-hero cleans his brushes on, of all things, an old black...
...Gallic gangster movies are like opera libretti; there are certain characteristics common to each succeeding story. These essential ingredients are, in random order: the daring under-world leader, known to one and all as a "real friend," his faithful but careless partner who consorts with loose-tongued women, a rival gang that never plays fair, an array of luscious showgirls, half-naked or otherwise, a huge bundle of stolen money that both sides are after, and various lesser mobsters that are always either being tortured or getting killed. This formula is slightly varied for each production, but the denouement...
...sixteenth-century religious music, American folk songs and spirituals, and a handful of unclassifiable songs. One of the latter was Francois Poulenc's Chanson A Boire, dedicated to the Harvard Glee Club and sung by the Elis. It's a sort of cadenza for chorus, and, despite occasional Gallic touches, did not sound very different from the American folk songs sung separately by both clubs...
...consulship while Spartacus was on the loose, is presented as the Dictator of Rome. To compound the cinematic crime, Caesar, the empire builder, is portrayed by Actor Gavin, a rose-lipped, sloe-eyed young man who looks as though he never got to the first conjugation, let alone the Gallic Wars. And Antoninus, a Roman poet, is played by Actor Curtis with an accent which suggests that the ancient Tiber was a tributary of the Bronx River. To these blunders is added the customary quota of glaring goofs (a map of Italy that looks like nothing seen in Rome before...