Word: reptilian
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...this matter of reality is perplexing. The loathsome, reptilian U.S. seems real enough, but the suspicion arises that Miller is rhapsodizing a Europe that 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...
...Actress Page, an artist of unusual richness and motility, soon melts any sense of frigidity in the heroine with her glowing warmth and charm. And Actor Harvey, a player with the frigid fascination of a lizard, is clumsily miscast as the hotblooded hero. Instantly the spectator senses that this reptilian type could never possibly pair off with the warmhearted heroine. Instantly the love affair loses its credibility and the picture its suspense. Nevertheless, the film conspicuously possesses Playwright Williams' characteristic virtue: a pathetic-romantic atmosphere that lingers from scene to scene like an ineffable sachet of self-pity...
...portico of the Acropolis' Erechtheum. The modern Greek rendering of the play has a venomous and vibrant intimacy that the English translation, transmitted at the City Center on transistor earphones, fails to reflect. In a cast that achieves a triumph of ensemble playing, Clytemnestra is coolly reptilian, and Aegisthus is a strutting upstart of self-aggrandizement who yet meets his implacable doom with dignity...
This year N.I.H. will spend $58,500,000 on medical research. How it pays off will mostly depend on human scientists, under Director James Shannon, but they in turn will be relying heavily on the 10,000 members of the institutes' piscatorial, molluscan, reptilian, arthropodal and lower mammalian staff...
...personifies the police power in a native Fascist regime. But it is Actor White-a British trouper usually cast as a potty colonel, a flaccid vicar, or a dear old rose fiend in Sussex-who domi nates the audience as a waving cobra fascinates a mouse. With his small, reptilian grin and oily suppleness, he conveys the immemorial image of the big political snake, the everlasting reason why you can't fight city hall...