Word: pompousity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...RICHTER, the screenwriter, sensibly trashed nearly all the Deane-Balderston play, retaining only certain key encounters between Dracula and his nemesis, Van Helsing. The latter is no longer a pompous vampire hunter but an ordinary professor whose daughter. Mina, becomes Dracula's first victim in England. No corny lines remain; at his most indulgent, Richter keeps an episode in which Dracula hurls a candelabra into a magnificent drawing room mirror that does not reflect his image. "Pardon me," he tells Van Helsing, matter-of-factly, "I dislike mirrors...
Banality aside, the love story suffers from Carradine's performance. Once more he is playing the corruptible innocent he already created in Nashville and Pretty Baby. This humorless characterization has calcified: instead of being boyishly naive, Carradine is just pompous and prim. Certainly he is no match for Vitti, who has rarely seemed as radiant and emotionally full-blooded as she is here. With smoky eyes and a voice to match, she reduces her co-star to the stature...
Starchy and suspicious, the Americans and their Soviet counterparts gathered next day at a long, polished table, read pompous statements to one another and still wondered what the hell was going to happen. David Aaron, disarmament planner-now a White House presence-reached across the table to light the cigarette of a Russian and dozens of bored cameramen came alive. Snap, click, whirr. Around the world a thin ray of hope shone from the morning's front pages immortalizing the symbolic U.S.-Soviet cooperation. By evening, with a little vodka under their collective belts, there was reason to believe...
...design is not just an innovative gimmick: it adds a crucial element of fun--something that the musical in its original version lacked. A production in the 1950s boasted a book by Lillian Hellman, lyrics Richard Wilbur, and music by Leonard Bernstein. But its cynical, pompous tone was almost totally out of touch with that of Voltaire's novel, a satiric classic that describes how a young innocent named Candide, whose tutor has taught him to believe this "the best of all possible world1," experiences an interminable and hysterical series of disasters that teach him to view life...
...sensitive black actor. What actually was shown was a new Congressman in Washington weighing the advice of his more experienced staff, one of whom was a black woman. Indeed, in the last show we taped, Dugan learns that being a lawmaker does not give him a license to be pompous...