Word: joans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only stars like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers have anything to sing about. Times are hard. No one wants to buy Arthur's music. An evil bank manager refuses to lend him the money to start up a store. Worst of all, his frigid wife Joan just doesn't like sex. "I want you to cut his thing off," she cries to a detective toward the end of this strange, sordid movie. By this time, not a few members of the audience may be thinking the same...
...doll voice uncannily reminscent of a T.V. commercial for an underarm deodorant called "Tickle." Both Martin and Peters approach their roles in a curiously stylized way, staring out of glazed eyes either vapidly (Peters) or with an intense manic glow (Martin). Only Jessica Harper, who plays the dull, frowsy Joan, seems to be able to travel comfortably between the make-believe world of the songs and her unhappy "real life" as Arthur's cuckolded wife. Perhaps if she had been in charge here, the movie--and even Arthur's thing--would have gotten the cutting it needed...
...unspoken affinity between the two sides as well, an affinity that does not exist between the Protestant Northern Irish and the English, or even between the Catholics in the north and south. The connections show up in indirect ways. Teen-age girls in Belfast adore the romantic novels of Joan Lingard, especially Across the Barricades ("when Catholic Kevin and Protestant Sadie are old enough for their hitherto un acknowledged attraction to flower into love"). It is not wishful thinking, exactly; Bernadette admits she would never date a Prod, because "nothing could come of it." But the possibility exists, nonetheless?...
MORALIST by Joan Abse...
Ruskin was the precocious child of doting parents, as Historian Joan Abse relates in this vigorous, compassionate biography, and his life through middle age was a struggle to free himself from their loving tyranny. "My mother had never let me play cricket lest it should quicken my pulse, step into a boat lest I should fall out the other side," he wrote wistfully. When he matriculated at Oxford, she followed him and took lodgings there, to oversee his physical and spiritual health. She was a fierce evangelical Protestant, and her husband, a prosperous and essentially self-educated wine importer...