Word: one-upmanship
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...thrillers she has written in a 55-year career are several classics: The ABC Murders is a fiendish triple trap, Murder in the Clouds, a sleek variant of the locked-room ploy set in the cabin of a small airplane, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw, a neat bit of one-upmanship on Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair...
...One word about the Union, the building where Yard freshmen will be eating most meals. The large resounding dining rooms with dark wood panelling, row upon row of long oak tables and antleer chandeliers, (yea, no joke, a Teddy Roosevelt '84, donation), will quickly become the social focal point of the class of '78. Friendships will be struck, romances started, food fights will erupt, political conspiracies argued, gossip will be gleaned and scholarly one-upmanship will be victorious over what must be the world's worst coffee. Dramatic social conflicts of whom to acknowledge, glance at, ignore completely...
...success. After all, by now just about everyone who visits Israel on similar junkets gets a VIP excursion to the Golan Heights or the Jordan River or Sharm el Sheikh. But, except for last week's 28 lucky fund raisers, how many can come home with the exquisite one-upmanship of the ultimate trip: "How I was captured by the Egyptians during my U.J.A. tour of Israel...
Rather depressing stuff, some may argue. In reality, it is not. This is partly because Storey peppers the play with a fusillade of humor, much of it of the caustic one-upmanship variety at which the British have few equals and no superiors. In The Contractor, as in The Changing Room, Storey reveals himself as a celebrator of communal male effort. The task of playing a rugby game knits the men of The Changing Room together in pleasure and in pain. The task of putting up and taking down the tent in The Contractor is not a stage charade...
...action, however, is David (Sami Frei), an artist who returns to Paris to pick up with Rosalie where he left off several years ago. David is a reserved and preoccupied figure, languidly handsome, and given to the terse, apocalyptic remarks with which soap opera segments end in mystery. The one-upmanship of the two suitors in their fight for Rosalie is the organizing theme of the early scenes. The camera reveals Cesar and David through her eyes, as she makes mental comparisons, and the tension is akin to that which accompanies long-winded introductions at championship fights. In this corner...