Word: raffish
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EXETER: In Major Della Rovere-Vittorio De Sica transforms from a raffish war profiteer (he helps political prisoners escape--for a fee) to the embodiment of the heroic general he is forced to impersonate. Continuous from...
Behind the slightly raffish, egocentric cast of Ionides' character lies solid achievement as a naturalist. No less than four separate species of snake bear his Latinized name as their discoverer, and 22 species of rare mammals have been hunted down by Ionides for zoos and museums, including the Addra gazelle, the sassaby, the Nubian ibex and the scimitar-horned white oryx...
Nickelodeon Sentiment. Although In the Swamp is surrealist in technique, with enigmatic central characters who are symbolic rather than human, the minor figures-rogues all-are marvelously funny and thoroughly human. From this point on, Brecht's plays fork in these two directions: the symbolic-didactic and the raffish-human...
Greed v. Mother Love. In Mother Courage (1939), one of his most popular plays and possibly his best, Brecht exhibits the raffish-human strain, and doctrine is relatively in abeyance. Mother Courage is an earthy female Falstaff with Falstaff's coarsely skeptical views of war, honor and courage. However, the Thirty Years' War is on, and since the profit motive is no laughing matter, Mother Courage cashes in on the troops. Trundling her wagon, a kind of mobile 17th century PX, behind the shifting battlefronts, she sells shoes, shirts and booze to the soldiers...
...compensate for how little else-actually, just the best lyrics-is top drawer. But other things prove of use; and the general setup-Silvers as a little man aching to be a big shot and inducing some old slot-machine racketeers to muscle in on jukeboxes-has a promisingly raffish...