Word: gruffness
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...actors from tripping over corpses. In addition to the ravishing Jacqueline Bisset, who appears as a rather tricky temptress, and Houseman, whose air of hothouse gentility is persuasive, Charles Bronson makes a pleasing shamus out of St. Ives. No big thing, mind. But he eases through the part with gruff grace and a few hints of low-rent charm. In Breakout, last year's Hard Times, and now here, Bronson has turned in good, engaging work. It is getting nice to have him around...
...special interest, perhaps, is a certain Aldo who preserves the celebrity faces of the current television season, along with other worthies, in paint on little flat rocks. He calls it "rock-art," and among the offerings we found that afternoon were Gerald R. Ford, Ed Asner, the gruff editor of Mary Tyler Moore fame, a rock with Mike on it (Douglas, that is), Merv (Griffin), even one with Pat Mitchell (I know who she is but I'm not sure what to call whatever it is that she does). Even Mary Hartman was preserved on stone. The only face missing...
John Gunther once noted that in Hong Kong, the Chinese, after observing how the English groaned and sweated, how gruff and red they grew on the court, mildly inquired why they did not hire coolies to play their tennis for them. Much the same sort of observation might be made about the psychological stresses of mixed doubles for many couples. Indeed, the mystery is, in view of the possible pain, why so many people want to play mixed doubles at all. One reason, masquerading under the jargon of togetherness, is a persistent yearning for a shared skill, for a kind...
...great American patriarch will never have it so good again. Clarence Day Sr., the gruff protagonist of Lindsay and Crouse's Life With Father, bullies his wife and children with nothing but a blustering charm--this was one classic stage family that managed to escape sinister Freudian entanglements, tragic alcoholic breakdowns, the crippling gaps between aspiration and achievement and other dark intertwinings of soul and psyche. Life With Father...
...music is a mix of serialism and tonality that saturates the evening with multiple layers of consciousness. Argento's orchestral score, in a masterly interpretation by Philip Brunelle, can be as gruff as Strauss at one moment, as ethereal as Debussy the next, sometimes underlining the drama at hand while simultaneously anticipating events to come. Most important, Argento can write for the voice. The land beyond, a second-act aria for Poe's wife Virginia, is almost Mozartean in its poignant simplicity. Virginia died of consumption at 24. In the opera she is resurrected, but after singing...