Word: lowbrowed
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What the American market mainly wanted before the Civil War was genre scenes of American life, which might or might not include blacks. Most American genre painting before Homer and Eakins was lowbrow stuff, in which blacks tended to get the roles played by the fiddling boors and carousing peasants in Dutch genre. They become lazy Sambos with watermelons, fiddling clowns, butts of practical jokes. But not all the time. "Sambo is not my man and brother," snorted William Makepeace Thackeray during his lecture tour of America in 1852-53. Yet when his secretary, Eyre Crowe, painted a group...
...lawyers sought business amid the chaos, scurrying among emergency- relief workers and hospital aides. They even tramped through the halls of Parkland Memorial Hospital handing out name cards to the families of the deceased. Top lawyers in the field, who get their cases mainly through referrals, consider such tactics lowbrow. "I have utter contempt for those who choose to get cases this way. They deserve the bad reputation they have," says Lee Kreindler, a New York City lawyer who won a record $7.9 million judgment in the Delta case...
...date notion of getting out of street crime and franchising it to black, Hispanic and Oriental gangs, thus achieving really big bucks and respectability. But instead of telling the story, Condon endlessly tells about it. Characters do not take on their own faces or voices, and when the lowbrow Partanna is made to say, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Pop. Shoot the bell ringer," it sounds phony. That's not Charley; it's Condon stopping the action to tell one more joke...
...outline, Moonstruck might seem an offer anyone could refuse. The Italo- American characters and mannerisms are familiar from several Martin Scorsese movies and a hundred lowbrow sitcoms. But Screenwriter John Patrick Shanley has an ear that confounds cliche and a plot that is both devious and inevitable. As photographed by David Watkin (Out of Africa), Moonstruck is as pristine and fanciful as Lady and the Tramp. As directed by Norman Jewison (A Soldier's Story), it moves with the crack of sexual friction. Jewison has also put together a terrific ensemble of actors. Cher, rag-dolled up in heavy Sicilian...
...Henry Miller, the Iliad by Woody Allen, the head of Nefertiti by Red Grooms"), an intraoffice scandal about an aging office boy who enriches himself by selling review copies as well as slots on the best-seller list, and a Shakespeare hoax that brings down the magazine's lowbrow chief, Newbold Press. Simmons demonstrates his versatility by composing nine "lost" sonnets by the Bard...