Word: raffish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...exploiter." Reprobate Innocent. He began to get assignments writing and reading for the BBC. He also wrote documentary films, though producers sometimes had to lock him in a hotel room to wring a finished script out of him. People loved him as a sort of raffish reproach to the world of respectability, a reprobate innocent. He got away with almost anything. The story goes that as an honored guest for an Oxford poetry society which served only select wines, Thomas asked for a jug of beer at the outset, cheerfully poured each successive vintage wine into the same...
...nominations for moviedom's treasured Oscars-but they stole the show. Broadcasting from the Cocoanut Grove, Irene Dunne's performance as straight man was one that even Dean Martin could envy. As for Lolly Parsons, at one moment she was tossing off her lines with all the raffish assurance of Tugboat Annie; the next, she was nearly disappearing from view in brilliant mimicry of the nearsighted Mr. Magoo as she sought to read her elusive script...
...short stories wears the scent of human garbage as if it were the latest Parisian perfume. Peopled with male and female prostitutes, harridans and homosexuals, the book first appeared in 1948 in a deluxe limited edition of 1,500 copies, has since brought $50 a copy as a raffish collector's item. While the edition is now no longer limited, the guiding theme undoubtedly is. Author Williams, 40, best known for his plays, snaps his literary shutter again and again on portraits of the hero as cripple, and on the human personality in states of hopeless, neurotic disrepair...
...Moon was still a smash hit in West Berlin, will move next week to a more commodious theater. Berliners, wearily familiar with occupation armies, were delighted with an American play that deliberately spoofed the U.S. Army's postwar occupation of Okinawa (TIME, Oct. 26, 1953). When Sakini, the raffish Okinawan, declares that "democracy is exhausting," German audiences howl. The boffo line for Berliners comes in the scene where Colonel Purdy announces his determination to bring democracy to the islanders if he has to "shoot every last one of them." Any nation that could kid its own foibles...
...sedulous devotion to the raffish, the evening is not entirely a success: there are ups and downs and starts and stops. Fine when it is funny, the play goes flat when it is all too strenuously trying to be. The flesh is weak in Lunatics and Lovers, and at times the inspiration seems even weaker. And hand in hand with a good pungent coarseness in the characters themselves goes a certain touch of vulgarity in the treatment of them. Nor, for all its lowdownness, is Lunatics and Lovers quite to the gutter born, with a truly deep-seated sense...