Word: humorless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Beatty has also been stripped. His buoyant sensuousness and vulnerability have been sheared off, leaving only sullenness. Cast as the wrong kind of stud, he plays a priggish, humorless, overdressed dandy, with pencil-thin eyebrows and moustache, who acts like an eight-year-old. Nicholson plays a bratty little brother to him. Beatty seems too uncomfortable in this role to play it back. The emotional current that should sparkle between them never connects. Their obsessive bickering, which ought to reveal an underlying affection, is irritable rather than responsive and only makes them seem incompatible. They have no signals in common...
Though Ginandes's ambition to allow her subjects to supplement her pictures with their own words in order to provide the viewer with a more comprehensive impression of these women is sincere, the quotes are too long, repetitive and humorless. Worse, the photographs too rarely give us any insight into the character of the sitters. Those that do, like the picture of the lesbian couple sitting on the steps outside their apartment, their faces cool masks of defiant disdain, make the verbal statements superfluous...
...sense that he hates mankind. He hates the web of social hypocrisy in which men and women entangle themselves. He hates everything that in Eliot's words is "as false as a smile and the shake of a hand." His insistence on absolute candor is blind, humorless and therefore funny. He is a moral prig who thinks of himself as the only honest man alive, and he wants the world to recognize it. He tells the truth till it hurts-others. Still, he raises an important question of principle. When does hypocrisy breed corruption...
...this Taffy writing in the New York Times to lambaste the greatest Englishman of his age, Winston Churchill? Was Welsh Actor Richard Burton trying a backhanded publicity stunt for the TV documentary The Gathering Storm, which starred Burton as a stringy, humorless Winnie and was aired to celebrate the centenary of Churchill's birth? Or was he playing protector of Fiancee Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, whose father, Prince Paul, handed over his country to the Nazis in 1941 and was publicly vilified by Churchill...
Perhaps the "loosening up" is a prelude to Plunkett's abandonment of his solemn, almost humorless tone. But it will take some time, if ever, for the dichotomy between Plunkett the offensive player and Plunkett the defensive man to become less distinctive...