Word: pasteboard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...least not in the pasteboard parable that West contrives. John Spada. an Italian American, runs his multinational conglomerate in the style of a medieval prince, but he is also, in the best potboiler parlance, "a man living a double life." When not wheeling and dealing, he heads Proteus, an apparently vast and clandestine club that liberates political prisoners. Proteus prefers handing out carrots to achieve its ends, but will use the stick when other means fail. Spada's crusade becomes a vendetta when his daughter and her Argentine husband are arrested in Buenos Aires and brutalized by security police...
...accent is on accent: preposterous pasteboard jewelry, exotic plumes, stiletto-heeled boots, multicolored gloves, and exaggerated hats that would justify any woman's ejection from an orchestra seat...
...Ulysses, Joyce's catalogue of facts cohered into a unifying myth., Coover's myth requires the diminution of historical figures into pasteboard grotesques; since that much is clear on the novel's opening pages, Coover's torrent of trivia seems like so much padding along the way to a foregone conclusion. He cannot resist parading his data: a nickname is provided for every U.S. President through Truman, and Betty Crocker, like a public address announcer, introduces the 96 U.S. Senators by name at the execution. He also likes to show off his literary ingenuity...
Back in the early 1930s my aunt, who lived in Manchester, Conn., introduced us to a new game called Bottle Tops, so called because it was played with the pasteboard tops then used on glass milk bottles. They were plain on one side and had the name of the dairy printed on the other. The playing board was a piece of manila paper marked off in 64 squares like a checkerboard. We called it the depression game...
...only two ways to mount a project like this: for gilded fun, which is fair enough, or for serious suspense, which is perilous, considering the mechanics of the plot. Director Sidney Lumet tries to avoid the problem in typical fashion-by getting around it. He tries to make the pasteboard characterizations more winning, if hardly more real, by casting luminaries in the roles...