Word: rabelaisian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Anton Drager (Rock Hudson) worships his own ego, and he has a cool contempt for anyone who does not do the same. He intends to pick the brains of a rumpled Rabelaisian master of tropical medicine named Brits Jansen (Burl Ives), and trade the findings for fame and fortune back home...
...never was. Sense and consistency are not what one asks of a polemicist. If his rotten eggs hit their target often enough, it does not matter what else they hit. And some of Miller's past eruptions have spattered the landscape marvelously, affronting puritans by proving the neglected Rabelaisian theorem that fornication can be funny. But more often, as in the present book, what Miller throws is not rotten eggs but gamy generalities (art is good, materialism is bad). His words tumble along at the same daft speed whatever the subject, but Miller, however good a pillowsopher, does...
...scandal broke last fall when Pre mier Josef Cyrankiewicz, Politburo Member Edward Ochab and other top functionaries suddenly got a rash of Rabelaisian letters that mingled demands for greater intellectual freedom with obscene personal denunciations. Most of the letters, many of which were mimeographed, were mailed from the same Warsaw letter box, and police soon identified the sender: Novelist Jerzy Kornacki, 53, a protégé of the late Polish President, Boleslaw Bierut, and author of several proletarian novels (the best known: Hauling the Brick Carts). He is also an active member of Warsaw's Crooked Circle Club...
...book, Tropic of Cancer is a soup, a whirlpool perhaps even a sewer. To make different order out of it is intensely difficult for the week-stomached, it is impossible. Characters and scenes float in and out of the with a wonderfully picaresque irregularity of Rabelaisian humor are broken off unexpectedly by passages approaching the drunken, frenzied poetry of a Rimbaud. Obscurity and philosophy, squalor and rhapsody are juxtaposed, crammed together, torn apart and tossed wildly, as if the book were the mixing bowl in which Miller, the mad chef, were preparing a salad -- to fling in the face...
...Regrettably, Director Claude Autant-Lara lacks both Pagnol's touch and Aymé's intensity. The Green Mare ain't what she used to be. Nevertheless she is, as the French say, green-which means, as the Americans say, blue. The plot, for example, involves a Rabelaisian family feud in which the antagonists fight to a finesse and take each other's wives. Best plonk: when a farmer finds a stranger dossing down with his dairymaid, he bawls indignantly, "Be off with you! I can handle the servants without outside help...