Word: prig
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though far from a prig, Richard Bland (71) is an unbending man. He detests war and all forms of violence, blood sports, meat eating and tobacco, and he once served a term in prison rather than bear arms. Far from holding these convictions against him, the people of the Lancashire mill town of Nelson have twice chosen little (5 ft.) Dickie Bland to be their mayor. "Nelson doesn't like Dickie's principles," said one townsman, "but it does like Dickie." Beyond ordaining vegetarian menus at official luncheons and showing his disgust at puffed clouds of tobacco smoke...
...correct his moral slackness. He watched himself for a month, and honestly tried to be more thoughtful, more helpful, more honest and all the rest. And then he found he was jolly well pleased with his progress. And he thought: 'Good heavens, I am becoming a prig! I must learn humility.' So he concentrated on humility for a week, and at the end of it he gave himself 18 out of 20 for humility ... I think that if the only standards are human ones, in man himself, self-righteousness is almost inevitable...
Vice meets a harrowing reward. The poor slob is marooned on a desert island with a prissy goggle-eyed missionary lady (Glynis Johns). Rescued at last, he is thanked by the parson "for sparing her." Ted gasps: "Me! and that sanctimonious, psalm-singing little prig! I've never been so insulted in my life!" The idea so unnerves him, in fact, that he gets smashing drunk to drive it out of his mind. Fadeout : Ted at the harmonium, wheezing away at a hymn, and reeking of salvation quite as repulsively as he ever did of booze...
...power which he takes to his death. He had it, Eliot explains, over since he resigned the Chancellorship to devote his whole being to the Church. In the first act, when he dismisses the temptors who came to lure him from his purpose, Gaydos was too much the prig. He tends also to overuse facial gestures. But in the death scene, when faced by four drunken assassins, he brings a great, cold dignity to the role...
...That the prig is incredible-is, in fact, a mere setup for the action-matters less than that everyone else is so nice. Never were people more aggressively charming, genteelly rowdy or sweetly romantic (for Late Love has more than its share of early love). Arlene Francis and Lucile Watson do what they can to enliven things; but the play is for those who take their tea very weak, and with three lumps of sugar...