Word: priggishly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Slade's protagonist is Scottie Templeton (Jack Lemmon '47), a divorced, once-promising writer who has squandered his talents on second-rate movies and television--and has had a damn good time in the process. Only his priggish 20-year-old son Jud seems to despise him; they haven't seen each other for two years when Jud comes to visit. Scottie wants them to spend time together, but Jud counters each of his father's jokes and suggestions with icy, detached monosyllables, preferring to journey off to a museum exhibit alone. Scottie's doctor arrives and breaks the news...
...through the last ten years, we see Suzanne suffering in the barren French countryside, chopping wood, feeding geese, brushing her hair back with a dirty hand and a sigh. The camerawork here resembles a series of still photographs, romanticizing the harshness of country life, portraying Suzanne's parents as priggish, old-fashioned country people. The severity of the surroundings is so exaggerated that instead of echoing Suzanne's misery it just makes her look silly and implausible. Would a hip woman from Paris really resort to practicing her typing with the cows in the barn to avoid disturbing her crotchety...
...represents Welles's moral vision at its most complex and contradictory: on the one hand, he is a repulsive figure--brutal, racist, eats candy bars the way most people smoke cigarettes--and employs illegal methods; but on the other, he cares deeply about people, unlike his self-righteous and priggish antagonist, the Mexican detective Vargas (Charlton Heston) and is always right in his intuitions of guilt. The other characters in the film are marvelous: Janet Leigh as Heston's hopelessly passive young wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor as the owner of a strip joint, Joseph Cotten as a detective, but best...
...that in an energetic, profligate culture like America's, language seems as disposable as ballpoint pens or beer cans. That throwaway mentality may account for some of the negligence. The argument is not between changes, linguistic innovation, new combinations on the one hand, and priggish correctness on the other. It is between meaning and meaninglessness. When language is reduced, so is civilization. George Orwell understood that "the smaller the area of choice [of words], the smaller the temptation to take thought...
Beatty has also been stripped. His buoyant sensuousness and vulnerability have been sheared off, leaving only sullenness. Cast as the wrong kind of stud, he plays a priggish, humorless, overdressed dandy, with pencil-thin eyebrows and moustache, who acts like an eight-year-old. Nicholson plays a bratty little brother to him. Beatty seems too uncomfortable in this role to play it back. The emotional current that should sparkle between them never connects. Their obsessive bickering, which ought to reveal an underlying affection, is irritable rather than responsive and only makes them seem incompatible. They have no signals in common...