Word: mountebanking
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Jack Nicholson is either a mountebank or a highly gifted actor. Possibly he is both. As the dead-eyed hero of a couple of obscure westerns that he produced himself (The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind), he made Clint Eastwood look like Laurence Olivier. In Easy Rider, he walked on and won the film from Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. Then he descended to his former persona in On a Clear Day, playing either Barbra Streisand's lover or a codfish. It was difficult to tell which...
Director, writer, scene designer and onetime actor, Franco Zeffirelli talks and acts like a mountebank, but he is a man of considerable talent and great versatility. "I am," he declares grandly, "the flag-bearer of the crusade against boredom, bad taste and stupidity in the theater...
...coverage of the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial, H. L. Mencken mercilessly shredded the arguments of Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, who served as a special prosecutor against the teacher of Darwin's theory. Wrote Mencken: "The mountebank Bryan, parading the streets in his seersucker coat, is pointed out to sucklings as the greatest man since Abraham." Was such reporting an attempt to influence the outcome of the trial...
...supercilious mountebank operating as a false-front intellectual, and wholly dependent for effect upon his unquestioned virtuosity as a gesticulator with hands, face and words. ARNOLD B. LARSON Manhattan Beach, Calif...
Lazarillo's last master, as far as the film is concerned, is a mountebank who dresses as a priest and then goes plodding about the boondocks, babbling dog Latin and dispensing illicit indulgences for the sins of an apparently endless supply of village idiots. In his new employment, Lazarillo frequently suffers pangs of conscience, but he seldom suffers pangs of hunger; and in the last reel he regretfully decides that, the world being what it is, survival depends less on nourishing the soul than on feeding the face...