Word: oversmug
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...budget from family and friends (with the aid of an Oxford alumnus. Director John Schlesinger, who helped get production equipment at a discount), has achieved a perfectly glittering surprise on its first try. Indeed the film is flawed at its center by an unattractive protagonist named Edward, an oversmart, oversmug womanizer and all-around user of people, who is supposed to summarize all that is wrong with traditional Oxford attitudes. In this role Robert Woolley does the nasty bits well, but mostly leaves out those moments of charm and vulnerability that might have evoked real sympathy...
...Alastair Sim is exactly the thing as the genial assassin. His simultaneously prunelike, condescending, and Machiavellian face and manner weave much distinguished nonsense in and out of the philosophic bomber's career--a career whose explosive beginning has included an overbearing headmaster, an overstuffed businessman, and an oversmug dictator. All were neatly vaporized before the war, during which the bomber quit his activities temporarily because killing dropped from an art to an occupation. When we meet him now, he is back in practice; his prey is Sir Gregory Upshott, an international water-muddier. Sim stalks him intently and wittily, particularly...
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