Word: memsahibs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last viceroy. Khan says coyly that he is "very eager" to be on the set - but the project is on hold indefinitely until the producers can get past the unease that India's Central Board of Film Certification has with the idea of the great statesman romancing a memsahib...
Beneath the surface exoticism, Lucas still betrays quite a few rough edges. Would any British memsahib, in 1936, refer to an Indian stranger as "cute" ? Or any native of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., talk of "open((ing)) your schmucky gob"? Does the world really need another lecherous British officer dithering, "I say, Lorna, I'm terribly keen on you"? At times, with their perfumed dissolutes and frustrated shrinks, the stories read like crude distillations of the Anglo-Indo-American vignettes of screenwriter-novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, or even like bite-size appetizers for the full-course feast of a Salman Rushdie novel...
Both are, in fact, a little dotty, to the delight of their native servant Ibrahim. Constantly being fired by the colonel and rehired by the Memsahib, Ibrahim cherishes Tusker's curses and colorful tirades ("I'll have both their guts for garters!") and repeats them to himself for days afterward. An unabashed Anglophile, he even admires the way his employers age. "The English," he thinks, "once they began falling physically apart, did so with all their customary attention to detail, as if fitting themselves in advance for their own corpses to make sure they were going...
American aristocracy! Simple contradiction in terms. The Memsahib's got a Yankee cousin. Know what his idea of ancient history is? Spiro Agnew. Still, if one's got to deal with foreigners, trust Burke's to do a wizard job. Here: watch Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, editorial director, in the introduction. First he dismisses those with no interest in genealogy as "the real snobs . . . secretly afraid of what they might find." Smashing reverse English, what? When the reader is on the defensive, the director presses home: "The only reason the undersigned can establish the identity of his earliest...
Considering the thudding banalities they are forced to utter, the actors man age a lively display of cocktail-party intelligence. Deborah Kerr is very pukka memsahib, and Barry Nelson displays his boyish charm, though the patina of age has begun to dull it. Frank Langella turns out to be the drollest character onstage with his stubborn macho pride in the size of his tail...