Word: prig
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other Rohmer stories, the protagonist is an amiably vain, self-righteous prig torn by his infatuation with two women. Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) is a dandified Paris antique dealer who decides to take a vacation from his mistress. His holiday goal at a friend's villa near St.-Tropez, he announces, is "to do and to be absolutely nothing." Unfortunately for his purposes, the villa is already occupied by a painter friend and by Haydee (Haydée Politoff), a pouty, bikini-clad young swinger who collects men much the way Adrien gathers antiquities. Her affairs with the painter...
...winter in War and Peace. But that was on home grounds. This time, on western European turf, he rather favors the little Corsican with properly heroic proportions. But he gives the British aristocracy only the back of his hand. Every man Jack of them is portrayed as an arbitrary prig, none more so than Wellington (Christopher Plummer). Yet even these lead soldiers give more credible performances than Rod Steiger in his oppressive, self-congratulatory Napoleon. Scene after marching scene, every familiar Steigerian trick passes in review: the pop eyes, the mouth like a gunny sack with the strings drawn...
...ignores every dramatic basic. It lacks conflict. Its characters are unreal and undeveloped, and it fosters no affinity between the playgoer and the players. Noah's three sons are, respectively, a lout (Shem), a lecher (Ham) and a moral prig (Japheth). Noah straightens out their biblically unrecorded sexual hang-ups like a pre-lst century marriage counselor and spars in spurious stage-generation-gap fashion with his youngest son, who is skeptical about the Divine Establishment...
Help wanted: a '70s version of humorist to save the '70s version of prig. This once and future humorist may already be present. Imprisoned inside every prig, a comedian is signaling wildly to get out. And that, finally, is the metaphor of cataplexy...
...prig builds reverent statues to himself. The comedian-if he can break out-crayons mustaches on them to save the prig from his own miscasting. What makes the '70s no laughing matter is this: without comedians to deter them, little prigs tend to grow into big fanatics. Bombs being what they are nowadays, a custard pie in the face of a few prigs is a cheap price for civilization to pay. Bombs and bomb throwers we've got. But where are the pies? Where are those pie throwers? They'll come in their own time and their...