Word: gentlemanly
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...question is not whether all men will ultimately be equal--that they cerainly will not--but whether progress may not go on steadily, if slowly, till, by occupation at least, every man is a gentleman. I hold that it may, and that it will." Alfred Marshall...
...devilish rogue or the impudent egotist better than Newman with his wry grin and the irresistable twinkle in his eye. But, Newman dwells under the curse of the Pretty Man. Remember Robert Redford as the prison warden in Brubaker? Newman's even less credible as a cop; he has "gentleman jock" written on his face and if you passed him in Grand Central you'd think he was a slick exec commuting from his Manhattan office to his small mansion in Darien...
Albee, in fact, is so attached to Nabokov that he can't resist introducing him onto the stage; this character, listed in the program as "A Certain Gentleman," opens and closes the play, and within it follows his characters around, chatting with them, tossing knowing asides into the audience, and generally acting urbane and oh-so-witty. Ian Richardson's letter- and paragraph-perfect performance--even his pinstripes seem to have raised eyebrows--can't entirely excuse Albee's officiousness in creating such a role. It's never pleasant to be talked down to; but when there's this character...
Albee's "Certain Gentleman" repeatedly notes that his characters "seem to have a life of their own." That's the kind of banality Nabokov might put into the mouths of one of his caricatured academics; if only it were true about Donald Sutherland's Humbert Humbert. Albee draws Nabokov's nymphet-lover as an unsympathetic egotist; Sutherland act it as the stoop shouldered, pedantic stereotype of an child-molester. And he pronounces his lines--even those which Albee has mercifully lifted verbatim from the novel--as though someone has tried to wash out his mouth with soap and left...
...time-honored gentleman's agreement between the Crown and the Fourth Estate: when the royal family wintered at Sandringham, the press stayed on Fleet Street...