Word: priggishly
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PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS denounced the horror genre as sexist, racist, sadistic, whatever, but that attitude has always struck me as priggish and unimaginative. At least until I sat through 12 torturous, claustrophobic hours at the Orson Welles and realized that even I--a horror buff since age six--had my limits. (The marathon did, incidentally, feature three superb films: Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Peter Bogdanovitch's Targets, and Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Women, the latter boasting a marvelous performance by the superlative Peter Cushing.) I haven't lost faith in the form: horror has traditionally brought...
...Toronto fans' hunger for wins was mild measured against their thirst for beer. Ontario's priggish provincial government deemed the vending of alcoholic beverages at the ballpark immoral...
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...