Word: martinets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been much more selective in his use of detail. But in a crucial way. The Years Alone is less interesting. It features the same sturdy central character, but how one misses that old supporting cast! Gone is the gallery of flamboyant Roosevelt drunks to predictably early graves. The martinet mother-in-law is dead too, and even Cousin Alice Longworth's acid tongue is inexplicably silent, though she is still alive. Most sorely missed of all is F.D.R. himself, whose death marked the end of the first book. Only traces of his wit remain, such as this prayer...
...films of the fifties. Though it's somehow acquired a treacly pacifist reputation, it's actually World War I attrition portrayed by a man who could back wars--were they not all fought so stupidly. Kubrick took a single incident, a suicide mission commanded from afar by an ambitious martinet, and revealed 1917 savagery in microcosm: fixed infantry moving against armed fortifications, prey to flairs and automatic weapons; military structures staffed by lawyers at the trenches and deadwood aristocrats at the drafting-table; calls to duty and service which can't quell the fears of men in torpor. Kubrick stuck...
...less bought Arnheiter's story. He wrote this book in part to set the record straight - and he has done so admirably. Inadvertently, however, he may have set it a bit too straight. In place of a martyred captain, readers now tend to get a some what loony martinet. If that version is far closer to truth, it somehow discourages reflection upon the captain's tortuous character. Mixed in with the sheer fudge and swashbuckle, there was in Arnheiter the pathetic likeness of an honorable inspiration: drilling the crew in riflery to repel prospective boarders, trying...
...right-wing political friends" and where John Kennedy was shot. In the Rose Bowl at Pasadena, Wechsler was pulling for Stanford against Ohio State because Stanford Quarterback Jim Plunkett is the son of blind parents, his mother a Chicano, and Ohio State Coach Woody Hayes is a middle-American "martinet of the old school...
...this polish, why doesn't the whole thing take flight? One reason, perhaps, was the unsure touch shown by most of the actors, all of whom at some point fumbled their lines. The tendency of minor actors to overact was painfully evident in John Archibald's appearance as the martinet Louis, and Peter Brogno's portrayal of Prince Paul. Alongside Paul Sprechler's Hoederer, Warren Knowlton as Hugo generally had his part under control; he seemed physically right for the part, even when his delivery of the rhetoric took on confused and querulous tones. Lucy Winslow, however, was throughout...