Word: patinaed
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Considering the thudding banalities they are forced to utter, the actors man age a lively display of cocktail-party intelligence. Deborah Kerr is very pukka memsahib, and Barry Nelson displays his boyish charm, though the patina of age has begun to dull it. Frank Langella turns out to be the drollest character onstage with his stubborn macho pride in the size of his tail...
Harry sings old songs to Tonto and reminisces lovingly about his courting and the wonders of his marriage. Reality chips the sentimental patina, though. His children, the products of this blissful union, are the walking wounded. Harry's New York son has resigned himself to a bleak wife and two ungovernable kids. His California counterpart, played with ironic self-pity by Larry Hagman, blubbers like a brat for a loan from Dad and for the benefit of his reassuring presence (he can split the rent that way). The daughter in Chicago (Ellen Burstyn) has just...
President Nixon is having his troubles with the men of God. There is a great irony in it. While Nixon himself has not invoked Scripture or the Lord's name in his pronouncements to great excess, he has, more than any other modern President, given his Administration a patina of piety. Now the political crimes of Watergate seem all the more noxious because of that banner of righteousness...
...RAGMAN'S DAUGHTER is one of those English proletarian soap operas, done up this time with a patina of gloss. The script was written by Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) in what could only have been a fit of self-loathing. An unhappy employee in a cheese factory, approaching middle age and dwelling on the glum fringes of the lower middle class, recalls a teen-age romance with the ragman's daughter. She was a lustrous girl who came riding down his street on a horse, smiling in soft focus. With glistening white teeth and flowing...
...worry. The book is still lull of gems. For those who need definitions of Yiddishisms that have crept into everyday use, Rosten provides examples, many with a fond patina of age: chutzpa is a case of "a man who, having killed his mother and father, asks the court for mercy because he is an orphan, poor schlemiel is a man who "falls on his back and breaks his nose." Some lines are cosmic as well as comic: "The rich have heirs, not children." "Good men need no recommendation and bad men it wouldn't help...