Word: prim
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...world in which everything is like something else, and nothing is itself. And the unrelenting sun of California only intensified the shadiness. By the end of his career, in fact, Chandler was pulling off a series of bitter twists and brilliant turns on the paradoxes of illusion: the prim secretary from Manhattan is, in truth, from Manhattan, Kans., and turns out to be a tight little chiseler, while the movie-star vamp has a fugitive innocence the more theatrical for being real. Chandler's greatest technical flaw -- his way, ironically, with plots -- arose from the simple fact that he felt...
...human being instead of a prerecorded announcement and shuffles slyly rather than striding officiously through an investigation? Were there, have there been, agents like his immediate superior Ward (Willem Dafoe), hiding a passionate moral (as opposed to a merely legalistic) commitment to the civil rights movement behind a prim manner and a pair of half horn-rims...
...prim, bespectacled schoolmarm, standing at the head of a well-scrubbed, disciplined class, is a stereotype from a bygone era. Today most high school students have had more experience with alcohol, drugs and sex than she ever could have imagined. Pregnant girls are seen in school corridors; others deposit their babies in school day-care centers. Violence is a regular visitor to the schoolyard. Last year in New York City there were more than 300 instances in which students punched, stabbed or otherwise assaulted public school teachers. Against such corrosive influences, it is increasingly teachers -- not parents -- who are called...
Ginna Carter is perhaps the best actor of the bunch. Her characters are all very distinct, and Carter seems as adept at playing a prim governess as a prostitute...
...verdant and manicured as Forest Lawn. They may have represented Israelites of two millenniums past, but they often looked Nordic; God must have had blue eyes. And they spoke the King's English: King James', with an assist from any screenwriter willing to gussy up his fustian. In these prim tones, the heart's revolution that Jesus preached became an Oxford don's lecture, and his ghastly, redemptive death a tableau painted on velvet...