Word: gruffness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...identity, made formally significant. At times, such gestures as the inclusion of envelopes addressed to Motherwell himself or fragments of programs advertising "I'aventure de I'art abstrait" seem incongruous, amidst the terms of abstract impersonality. For surrounding the bits of cut and pasted everyday material are the gruff lines and shapes of Motherwell's own brand of abstract expressionism. But the elements which move to the forefront are the individual ones: it is the artist's signature which is rendered large and explained by the inclusion of materials reflecting the artist's day-to-day life and basic...
Wurf has achieved his success by a kind of gruff militancy that is a fading memory in many unions. A last-minute college dropout (in his senior year), he looks deceptively like a brooding scholar with his horn-rimmed glasses, roughhewn features and thatched gray hair. He dispels the image when he speaks, showering listeners with four-letter words in a manner that is both threatening and amiable. Wurf's dogged, determined style has aroused traditionally conservative public workers. "Let's face it," he says, "a guy who's been collecting garbage for 20 years...
...cliché. It is all too likely that such ecological chaos may occur, but there have been so many melodramatic warnings about it in essays and speculative fantasies such as this that urgency becomes blunted and worn through repetition. Heston, forsaking his granite stoicism for once, makes a properly gruff policeman, but it is likely that Soylent Green will be most remembered for the last appearance of Edward G. Robinson, who plays a cantankerous intellectual. In a rueful irony, his death scene, in which he is hygienically dispatched with the help of piped-in light classical music and movies...
...best, Private Parts is a smooth parody of hellhouse horror melodramas, with an unsparing musical score by Hugo Friedhofer that furnishes a crescendo every five bars. The cast, however-except for Lucille Benson, who is gruff and quite good-seems to consist mostly of rejects from Central Casting, and the villain (John Ventan-tonio) looks like someone who spends most of his time in the balcony of all-night movies...
...career that ended without glory when his mother followed him to the training camp and reclaimed him. But when he was 17, his parents allowed him to quit school and leave for the Army, a time-honored ritual in coal-country. His father gave him a gruff word of advice; his mother didn't cry. Thus began a quarter of a century of excellence in service of America, service that has not yet ended...