Word: off-guard
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...clerk in a tax office. He apparently enjoyed the stultifying formality of the Hofburg. Once, when he awoke very ill in the middle of the night, he was able to bark only one phrase at the physician who had scurried to him: "Formal dress!" If he had any off-guard moments, they were reserved for his marvelously bourgeois relationship with Actress Katherina Schratt, a love that lasted until he died. The Emperor regularly nipped down to Katherina's house for coffee after early morning Mass. Delighted Viennese fiacre drivers called him "Herr Schratt...
Despite their crude attempts to throw potential detractors off-guard, Magnum Force's Ted Post and The Seven-Ups' Phil D'Antoni, as well as The Laughing Policeman's Stuart Rosenberg, are interested mainly in zapping their audiences. Force's liberal apologia count for naught when the director's only feeling is for carnage (a man's head getting shorn by a girder, or a pimp choking a whore with Draino). And The Seven-Ups' story of mixed roots in Little Italy--strong Buddy grows up to be a cop, while his weak friend Vito turns crook--is naturalism used...
Never one to give in against unfair odds (and we suspect that Mr. Mailer, armed with a microphone, gets even money against the collective voices of a jammed Lowell Lee) he worked his way to a begrudged dominance by catching the audience off-guard with asides in impressively fluent double-talk, invocations of Harvard's Classical past, of God's blessing on the Advocate and Drinking in Public. We thought, at the time, that Mr. Mailer has a lot to learn about making films, but that he stands unchallenged authority the of putting audiences where he wants them...
...unexpected high-level policy switch, the sun takes up revolving around the earth. Informed sources report that even the CIA was caught off-guard, quoting the director as saying. "This is the first counter-revolution in years we didn't finance." John Kenneth Galbraith calls the unexpected turn of events" positively medieval...
...York officials seemed to have been caught slightly more off-guard by the riot at Attica and were too engrossed in their efforts to restore order in the prison to give much speculation to the emotional motivation of the prisoners. To be sure, Commissioner Oswald and the negotiating committee of outsiders attempted to discover the prisoners' physical grievances, yet the ultimate violent response of the state, and Governor Rockefeller's posture towards the revolt, the appearance of Bobby Seale, and even the entreaties of the negotiating committee revealed not so much a concern for the safety of the hostages...