Word: prosaic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dash, nor was the Orchestra able to warm to its part in the proceedings. Unhappily, the Brahms Tragic Overture also turned out in a pale, unsatisfying version. The opening was uncomfortably ponderous rather than massive, while the uncanny march towards the middle was revved up to a prosaic speed...
JEALOUSY, by Alain Robbe-Grillet (149 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.75). The author admires cinema techniques, and his book would make an excellent art-house movie. But like his earlier work, The Voyeur (TIME, Oct. 13, 1958), it is also thoroughly irritating. A prosaic love triangle is established on a remote banana plantation-a planter (the book's nameless narrator), his wife and a neighboring plantation owner. If this were one of Paul Bowles's African novels of sin and sun, the weather would cloud up on cue, providing a timpani accompaniment to the heroine...
High Pressure. Meteorologists have a more prosaic explanation. There have been almost twice as many hours of sunshine this year in France as in normal years, apparently because of a high-pressure area in the Canary Islands that pushed the normal summer storms southward. Thus the northern vineyards enjoyed a season of incomparable warmth, free of the violent hailstorms that slash the vines and bruise the grapes. At the same time there has been enough moisture in the ground to keep the vines fresh. "The leaves are still green as we pick," says one grower. "This means a glycerine content...
...outset. Mr. Bartley (Macdonald Carey) has the family dog "put away" without so much as consulting young Arthur. The inordinate attention lavished by Mrs. Bartley (Marsha Hunt) on her daughter's approaching marriage, plus the prosaic preoccupations of these prosaic parents, drives young Arthur to a basement escape with his contemporaries, where furtive beers foam up into braggadocio, cigarettes mingle with clumsy sex experiments, and draw poker alternates with the raw pathos that gives the picture its fleeting moments of real feeling. It is only in the quiet, anxious scenes of awakening love that Director-Co-Writer Philip Dunne...
Many critics have been quick to look down their pedantic noses at Shakespeare's Merry Wives. They decry its lack of psychologic or philosophic depth; they bemoan its coarse language; they complain that almost none of it is in verse. Indeed the play is prose, but not prosaic. And the critics blame Shakespeare for not producing what he never had the slightest intention of producing. There is evidence that Queen Elizabeth I was so delighted with the character of Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV that she commanded the writing of a play about Falstaff in love...