Word: pen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like masters of more exalted arts, Cartoonist Walt Kelly succeeded in turning an imaginary landscape into a public preserve. With pen and wit he put together the world of Pogo, an inspired amalgam of bogs, hollow stumps, hog-jowl dialect and cheery absurdity. There, over 150 anthropomorphic critters gnawed away at the English language, baring kernels of political meaning, and carried on not-so-innocent satires of human pomposity. Phineas T. Bridgeport, the Barnum of bears, orated in billboard letters that burlesqued hucksterism everywhere. "Nuclear physics ain't so new and it ain't so clear," declared Rowland...
...most poisonous pen on Broadway is wielded by Critic John Simon. Reviewing the new play Nellie Toole & Co. in New York magazine, Simon dipped into strychnine to describe the star, Sylvia Miles, 41, as "one of New York's leading party girls and gate-crashers." Streperous Sylvia, who was acclaimed as the prostitute in Midnight Cowboy, wasted no time talking back. Invited to the same New York Film Festival party as Simon, she piled her plate with pat, steak tartare, brie and potato salad and dumped it over him. "Now you can call me a plate crasher...
...idol was Napoleon. He kept a little statue of the Emperor on his writing desk for inspiration. Balzac's opinion of his own worth was certainly Napoleonic: "I have the most extraordinary character. I am astonished by nothing more than myself." His goal was to do with his pen what Bonaparte had done with the sword. He succeeded. As V.S. Pritchett says, "His fecundity throbs, his power of documentation, his ubiquity as a novelist are extraordinary. There is the spry, pungent and pervasive sense that, in any scene, he was there and in the flesh...
...debts, contracts, mistresses, houses and more debts without a sense of the relish with which this complicated and violent genius conducted his messy life. It may be that as a biographer Pritchett is too much of a smart, admiring English shopkeeper to do justice to this Napoleon of the pen. A little awe might have helped. ∙ Martha Duffy
WHITE LIGHTNING concerns a good old boy named Gator McKluskey (Burt Reynolds) who is serving time in the Arkansas pen for messing around with illegal liquor. Word reaches him that his younger brother has been murdered by a local sheriff (Ned Beatty), who has been getting a substantial skim off the moonshine profits. McKluskey turns state's evidence in order to get himself out of prison and get the goods on the sheriff. There is grim melodrama and folk comedy here, but Screenwriter William Norton sloughs off the more serious themes of an informer working inside a situation...