Word: martinet
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More interesting than the whodunit part of Fuller's play is the "Who the hell was he?" aspect in which Waters' complex character is explored. Waters has tried to scour himself to whiteness through discipline and excellence. He is a martinet who addresses his recruits as "shiftless lazy niggers" and hounds one guitar-strumming vagabond singer, sweetly played by Larry Riley, to his death. "They ought to work you niggers till your legs fall off," he screams at his charges, meaning "snap to and measure up," the one-line basic English catechism of the U.S. regular Army sergeant...
Indeed, so powerful has that image been that one sometimes forgets how splendid he has been as a character actor. The military martinet of Fort Apache, the cold-eyed outlaw of Once Upon a Time in the West, even the hilariously befuddled herpetologist "Hopsy" Pike of The Lady Eve-they all light up in one's memory as the spirit that animated them flashes in Fonda's eyes. Without raising his voice he gives a bravura performance as he moves from depressed withdrawal to momentary rages, from the struggle to express affection to the struggle not to express...
...Conrad industry. Frederick Karl's monumental but plodding 1979 biography now holds the record for sheer size at 1,008 pages. A new book by the novelist's son John, Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered (Cambridge University Press), offers filial recollections and depicts the writer as a martinet, trying mightily to overcome his natural reserve, able to show his family little open affection, and perpetually striving for a financial security that was always just beyond reach...
...moral worth can have any real meaning at all in the face of such horrors as the Nazi extermination of the Jews. The spiritual bankruptcy that has turned Toomey's great-niece and 1400 other flower-children into drones eager to be manipulated by a murderous peace-and-granola martinet is a similarly graphic example of the same twentieth-century morality that allowed the Nazi tragedy to take place...
When Anna 2 as a dancer wants to show off her art, Anna 1 convinces her that if she wants to earn money she'd better show off her body instead. Later, as an actress, Anna 2 grows angry at her director's martinet-like behavior, but her sister explains to her that anger against injustice won't do for a girl who's trying to make it in the world. In the longest section of The Seven Deadly Sins, Anna 1 argues with and then manipulates her sister to prevent her from putting aside a rich lover...