Word: murk
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After 45 years in thriller country, Eric Ambler is still the master of murk. Ironic, cerebral, smooth as vintage port, he has created an all-too-familiar world of doublecross and blackmail where the heroes are unheroic and the villains almost likable. The Care of Time is quintessential Ambler from the very first sentence: "The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week...
...pidgin words, rather the way the Sioux talk in old western films, are produced-to no effect whatsoever. My first attempt at a conversation in Russian -just to say that I had tried-was with an elderly fisherman staring morosely at the tiny float of his line in the murk of the Moscow River. I rehearsed behind him, peering into my pocket dictionary, and when I thought I had the word right, I put on a bright smile and, leaning against the stone balustrade, I asked in an offhand way, "Bolshoye?" This is the word...
...oldtime jungle horror movie. His murder, which is archly intercut with the ritual slaughter of a carabao, is the film's only poorly shot death scene. Apocalypse Now's much talked-about discarded ending - another air raid - would not have illuminated this murk...
...well, never drowning singers out, but its sound sometimes became a bit muddied on the long trip from the back of the Loeb stage into the auditorium. During the entr'acte, when the curtain which hid the musicians lifted and the spot shone on them for a change, the murk cleared, and the audience could pay some attention to the type of music Ellington wrote without singers' personalities intruding...
...center of the rock swarm was the Troubadour, a dank Santa Monica Boulevard bar that offered newcomers three-song auditions on Monday nights. Fast talkers who knew they needed only ballpoint pens and promising new groups to become record company executives jostled in the Troub's murk with finger snappers who knew they needed only luck and chord books to become rock musicians. The Poneys wangled a gig at the Troubadour. They had hit the small time, but they were rock musicians...