Word: gruffness
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...hell, but the postwar limbo may be worse. Grieving is a job for the strong. So says French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier in his exemplary Life and Nothing But. This epic romantic drama, set in the aftermath of World War I, reins in its anger but not its wistful passion. Gruff Philippe Noiret plays a French officer assigned to choose the corpse that will serve as the nation's Unknown Soldier. As he assists two women -- an attractive aristocrat (Sabine Azema) and a young teacher (Pascale Vignal) -- in locating their men, he realizes that there are many casualties on the scarred...
...transferred to another department by the quick press of a button, but this time a gruff voice demands...
That was a vintage De Laurentiis performance from the mid-1980s, when bankers and investors were enthralled with the gruff-talking miniature (5-ft. 4-in.) movie mogul. De Laurentiis proceeded to lose nearly $200 million of their money in a grandiose and allegedly fraudulent attempt to build an entertainment empire. By 1988, after producing two dozen money-losing pictures in two years, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy...
Raymond Chandler influenced the American detective novel so strongly that even his imitators have imitators. Among the best of the second-generation models is Robert B. Parker, 57, whose private investigator, Spenser, shares Philip Marlowe's gruff chivalry and, like Chandler's "Galahad of the gutter," bears the surname of an Elizabethan literary figure...
...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...