Word: pompousity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...addition, Mankiewicz's screenplay contains some effective frills of its own: a love affair between the valet and a former employer, a beautiful Polish countess, some bright epigrammatic dialogue, and an array of skillfully drawn diplomatic officials. Particularly clever use is made of the contrasting personalities of the pompous, victimized, British Ambassador (superbly played by Walter Hampden) and the disdainful German Ambassador (equally well played by John Wengraf), who keeps insisting to his "juvenile delinquent" colleagues that the information they are purchasing is accurate...
...Yaleman Morris was one of the eager young men of Fiorello La Guardia's Fusion administration in New York. He served as president of the city council under the Little Flower (1938-46), ran unsuccessfully for mayor against William O'Dwyer. Morris has a gift for the pompous phrase and the ill-turned paragraph; as a reporter once said to him: "You were born with a silver foot in your mouth...
From that moment on, audiences should instinctively reach for their safety belts while Hero Stewart desperately tries to convince a skeptical pilot and a pompous official hierarchy that what started as a problem in pure science has become an urgent matter of life & death...
...humor has been based on a good-natured release of destructive urges. Once, looking for a strong finish for a musical-comedy skit about bike marathons, Jimmy threw his bike into the orchestra pit-and had to promise in writing not to throw anything at musicians again. A pompous ad extolling the uses of wood in modern life inspired his famous "Wood Number." Rushing wildly through a nightclub, Jimmy would tear up wall moldings and toilet seats, grab salad bowls and meat blocks to make a huge pile of trophies in mid-floor, while he chanted the glories of wood...
...interests of research, Webb uses false papers to get admitted as a 77-year-old to a dreary old folks' home. Before long, his fellow dotards are capering like retarded children, he has deflated pompous Preacher Hugh Marlowe, and increased the pulse beat of pretty but repressed Nurse Joanne Dru. Then Webb is exposed as a fraudulent oldster and, somewhat irrationally, the other inmates turn against him. Eventually, of course, the old folks re-embrace their benefactor, and Belvedere ends in a damp rush of sentimentality that finds the nurse and preacher in each other's arms...