Word: gallicized
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There is a fine Gallic impudence to the notion: take Robinson Crusoe, that age-of-reason parable of Western civilization's triumph over rude nature, and turn it upside down. In this position Crusoe's diligence, rationality, racial pride and Christian ethics-the very qualities that in Defoe's handling ensured Crusoe's survival-get lost while Crusoe accepts the "primitive" values of his black manservant. Call the book Friday to make the irony unmistakable. So much for Western civilization...
...several scenes, the main French characters are a foot taller than usual owing to the use of stilted boots. And they wear modified hockey outfits complete with shinguards--in a properly Gallic blue, be it said. I suppose all this is to emphasize the enormous odds facing the outnumbered British. When conversing with the British, the French speak English with a French accent. When the French talk among themselves, however, Kahn has provided them with a French translation of Shakespeare's text. While they spout French, a man and woman at the downstage extremities simultaneously speak the English version into...
...sure, Le Clézio asks big questions, such as What is Life? with an earnest lyric gift. At times he captures the bubble-like transiency of youth with touching Gallic elan ("Who wrote 'I love you' on a cigarette paper and then smoked it? Who picked a flower and put it in a glass of water? Who ate a vanilla ice on September 14, 1966, at twenty-five minutes to midnight, thinking that it was an eternal ice-cream cone, an eternal ice, an eternal yellow-white flavour?"). He is also adept at playing those "In" games...
...departure only by comparison with the preposterous presumption of the 1930s, when French novelists assumed that all Parisians thought like Voltaire and talked like Racine. In England and elsewhere, low speech in fiction has been a commonplace convention for decades. Only a Frenchman would regard it as a Gallic invention...
COOGAN'S BLUFF. French film critics have long hailed Director Don Siegel as a minor genius, and this film is ample proof that his reputation is no Gallic caprice. With measured professionalism, Siegel tells the story of an Arizona sheriff (Clint Eastwood) who travels to New York to extradite a prisoner...