Word: hapless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...answers. The thoughtful Edwin Newman is so self-effacing that at times he seems to be turning away from the camera. Barbara Walters often offers a quickstep apology for asking a sharp question, then zeroes right in. Bill Moyers is a moralizer whose imponderable "big" questions sometimes drive his hapless subjects to embarrassingly hasty profundities. But all of these interviewers know that their job is to draw out a person. It is not, as in the quite different Firing Line assignment of the agile William F. Buckley Jr., to debate as an equal...
...always wise to remember the captain or maitre d' of a top Manhattan restaurant. Though he will curtly accept a tip (usually $2 or $3) as his due, the failure to pay homage may cause him to pursue a departing diner, somewhat like a crow cawing at a hapless cat, with elaborate and sarcastic expressions of thanks; if he has seen your credit card, he may personalize the departure-"Thank you, Mr. Bumblebottom" -practically onto the street...
...Poland, is an adopted son of a Mohawk tribe, and has lately been celebrated as a pamphleteer against the British Crown. A gaunt unkempt figure racked with gout, Lee is highly critical of other men's soldierly skills. "Booby-in-chief' was his sobriquet for one hapless general under whom he served during the French and Indian...
Actually there are not enough police available to supervise the shebeens or control the populace. Thugs known as tsotsis prowl the streets, particularly on payday, to mug hapless passersby. With murders running at the rate of 1,000 a year, the all-black Soweto urban council (which advises on Soweto affairs for the all-white Johannesburg city council) has called for vigilante patrols...
These rotten little kids are meant to carry the freight of the novel's frenzied bully-boy philosophy. In this hapless screen translation by Lewis John Carlino (a scenarist making his directorial debut), they just come off looking like second-class citizens of The Village of the Damned. Fortunately, it is impossible to take the movie seriously on any level. A film maker who uses pounding pistons and dripping hoses for phallic symbols is a threat only to himself...