Word: marcus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Take Marcus Pendleton, the hero. He is, to be brutal about it, a fat slob. As Ustinov plays him, he slobbers, mumbles, stutters and swaggers. He is the kind of man who seems to have dandruff on his teeth. While the plot calls for Pendleton to pose as a computer expert and hitch up with an IBM-type operation to embezzle it out of millions, you know as soon as you see him that he'll be caught in the act. As a result, the fun is not in his attempted theft, but in what he does during his spare...
...things he does is meet Maggie Smith, in the form of a character named Patty Terwilliger. Patty, like Marcus, is one of those people success and glamour have passed by. She can't keep a job (she loses a position as a meter maid because she doesn't have the heart to give a ticket); she attracts wretched men; and, when she cooks dinner for a gentlemen caller, the meal burns on the stove...
...does play the flute for Marcus one night. And Marcus, not totally bereft of talent, plays the piano to accompany her. They fall in love, of course, and it's a scene that is something to see. The passion of two middle-aged failures finally breaking through the lone-liness of their lives can be much more exciting than Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway playing an erotic game of chess...
...ultimate loss, plus the lesser defeats that lead up to it. Most of the authenticated sages?quite a few losers among them? emphasize a very ancient idea: because the loser alone controls his attitude, he can always change that attitude and regard defeat as unimportant. "Our life," wrote Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor-philosopher, "is what our thoughts make...
...Marcus Morton was elected Governor of Massachusetts by one vote out of 102,066. In the 1916 presidential election, Charles Evans Hughes seemed a certain winner until returns from California two days later gave Woodrow Wilson the state by some 4,000 votes out of the nearly 1,000,000 cast. Less than one vote per precinct could have swung the election to Hughes. In 1960, John Kennedy beat Nixon by only 112,803 popular votes out of 68.8 million. Less than one vote per precinct would have given Nixon a popular victory...