Word: lames
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Extracted with misplaced fidelity from Robert Marasco's unfortunate 1970 Broadway success, this lame tale about the corruption of innocence is little more than a trot for Lord of the Flies. An unpopular Latin teacher nicknamed "Old Lash" (James Mason) is certain that all the trouble is caused by his colleague Dobbs (Robert Preston), whom he describes as a "malevolence" and an "obscenity." Dobbs, however, is beloved of all the boys and Lash heartily despised as an overbearing, paranoid pedant. The bitter rivalry between the two teachers leads eventually to madness, suicide and the equivocal triumph of evil...
...other stories are worth mentioning-as assaults, the one astonishingly good, the other astonishingly awful, on the reader who otherwise would be in serious danger of falling asleep over this lame and longwinded assemblage of "short" (if only they were shorter) stories. The first of these, "Mrs. Fortescue" succeeds quite possibly by shock value alone. An angry adolescent discovers that an old woman living in the apartment upstairs is a whore, whom he promptly-if I may quote-"I think the appropriate word here is screws." Lessing spares the reader no detail of the act. It is horrible and pathetic...
...breakthroughs in foreign relations, Nixon would now carve out a program of domestic achievement that was equally impressive. Officials, of course, would not necessarily talk with freedom about future programs just before the election, even if they knew of any. The evidence is not conclusive for another reason: a lame duck President's concern about how history will rate him may yet produce surprises...
...except Riegle, is a major reference point in O Congress. With unwarranted bravado, McCloskey took his crusade against President Nixon to New Hampshire, hoping to duplicate the now mythic McCarthy venture of 1968. But the McCloskey high horse, saddled with an apathetic electorate and an empty purse, pulled up lame at the polls, dumping not Nixon but McCloskey instead. The book ends with Riegle, McCloskey, and Harvard's own Chuck Daly administering it a broken hearted coup de grace...
David Warner's lame, stuttering Claudius is ironical, resilient, self-deprecatingly witty and wistfully sad as he realizes that even an Emperor cannot restore freedom to a people who no longer desire it. This is Playwright John Mortimer's staunch salute to Robert Graves' novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, but as drama it is a sloppy counterfeit...