Word: prig
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...just like their marriage: civilized, ruefully witty and without the slightest resonance. Blythe Banner has an agreeable asperity as Joan; Michael Moriarty has a disagreeable whininess as Richard. He should have been dissuaded from an attempt at an Ivy League accent, which turns him into a male chauvinist prig. But let the blame fall where it truly belongs: on a scenario by William Hanley that is without persuasive incident or dialogue, direction by Fielder Cook that is without texture or viewpoint. The aim here was obviously to do something elegant and up-market for television. The result is a bloodless...
Daughter Gillian (Ellen Parker) is a venomous feminist whose speeding on the liberation freeways has brought her an abortion and several emotional casualties. As for Younger Son Charles (Robert Burns), he is something of a militant prig, spared the worst of Bernard's blight through the harmonious offices of his wife-to-be's parents. This girl, Gwen (Jessica Drake), is mocked by the family for her lack of sophistication, but she is a judgment on them in the simplicity of her goodness...
...Mornings on Horseback finally lacks the salient characteristic of the Roosevelts-enthusiasm. In spite of Teddy's strenuous self-improvement and relentless selfdiscipline, McCullough finds something spoiled about the prig who talks of keeping himself "pure," for some "rare and radiant maiden" and postures for the camera as "the plainsman" in custom-tailored buckskins with dagger and sheath from Tiffany. The author appears to prefer Black Sheep Elliott, who, lacking what he called his brother's "foolish grit," collapsed under the responsibility of being a Roosevelt, although surviving long enough to father Eleanor, the wife...
...There is no question that Polanski's images-with Brittany doubling for "Wessex"-are frequently striking. He does less well by Tess, the poor doomed girl who, forced to rise above her station by family ambition, is ruined by a rascally wastrel and then misunderstood by the prig to whom she gives her heart. Everyone the director sets to moving through Wessex clumps along very slowly, weighed down by the invisible chains of Hardy's famous Fate. His leading lady, Nastassia Kinski, a truly beautiful young woman (see last year's Stay As You Are), is further...
...triangle; yet, the nature of that love is never articulated. Does Queen Guenevere (Christine Ebersole) love King Arthur (Burton) for the sweet reasonableness with which he wishes to foster justice and peace? Does a surge of passion draw her to Lancelot (Richard Muenz), even though he is a charmless prig? Ebersole's Guenevere is closer to marble than to flesh, and, in any event, we never do learn what these three people feel for each other...