Word: mocks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cukor fabricates stock character types and conventional plot complications with playful expertise. Henry, the stodgy middle-class bourgeois, Augusta, the eccentric aunt, Visconti, her wildly romantic macho first love, and her present lover, Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ransom to Visconti held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all. Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. Having sacrificed practically all she own when she finally does deliver the ransom...
...FINAL MOCK BALLOT RESULT...
Last month Bob Erlam, publisher of the Whitehorse Star (whose mock-Latin motto is "Illegitimi non carborundum" or "Don't let the bastards grind you down"), decided that it was time to curb Valerie's ticketing. His solution: the deployment of an "antimeter maid" who would make the same circuit as Valerie, and feed almost expired meters with nickels instead of issuing tickets. Her wages (about $90 a week) and expenses would be paid by Erlam, Hougen's Ltd., a downtown department store, and contributions received from grateful nonticketed motorists...
Despite these flaws the play's ornate, Gothic-novel quality makes it fully enjoyable. It twists down the dark tunnels of crime with the special mock-seriousness that delights every mystery lover, exploiting all the best conventions on its way. In the best moments I was convinced every door hid a secret corpse, and that every goodness contained a little folly...
...chronicling the invention of the horse-collar. But his artistic effectiveness derives mostly from his subtleties of form. As if the drama in his allegory "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying," weren't sufficiently strong to express the dilemma of outmoded, outrageous American simplicity abroad, he invests it with a mock-epic structure, all the more sharply exposing his quiet American's hollowness...