Word: haplessness
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...popularity, but it might also eventually forge a potentially explosive alliance between the violent left and hard-pressed workers. Yet unless Videla and his colleagues are ready to deal forcefully with Argentina's economic mess and restore public order, they cannot hope to do much better than the hapless former dancer they finally moved off the stage...
American anxiety over porn is little more than a century old. Early America had few obscenity laws. The new nation's first recorded court decision did not come until 1815, when six hapless Philadelphians were convicted of showing for profit an indecent painting. The first federal restriction came in 1842 with the passage of a law that forbade importing obscene pictures. In 1865, in response to fears that smut had been corrupting the Union's soldiers, such things were barred from the mails...
This bit of crepuscular enlightenment is Robinson Crusoe glazed with contemporary revisions. Here a hapless Crusoe (Peter O'Toole) is portrayed as an overbearing racist. He may be clever enough at fending for himself alone on the island, but human companionship brings out the worst in him. When Friday (Richard Roundtree) and some cannibal friends wash ashore on "his" island, Crusoe dispatches them one by one. Soon only Friday is left, and Crusoe is about to slay him when the black man instinctively adopts the one pose that will save him from the white man's wrath...
...varsity basketball team completed its season-long nose dive to the bottom of the Ivy League Saturday night as Brown exploded for 60 second-half points and routed the hapless Crimson...
They are the cast of the too-too divine comedy that Ringling must wander through. Atherton hits the right note of hapless affability, but it is still only one note. All of the other roles are played by Ron Leibman and Anita Gillette, whose talents for mimicry and mime relieve a good deal of the script's bittersweet sentimentality and soft-core cynicism. Even evoked as burlesque, the brooding comic spirit of Dante is not suited to the underworld of show business, where the principal sin is usually self-delusion rather than pride...