Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...generation that endured to see its values-not well defended but well believed in-derided across the generation gap. The genre is women's fiction, and the book lapses occasionally into jargon and sentimentality. But in a very short compass, with extraordinary deftness, humor and a rueful shrewdness edging toward wisdom, it rises above genre to something not unlike small genius. "Nowadays, everyone knows a little something about the mind," thinks the lady, "though it doesn't seem to have helped as much as one could wish." And that's true...
Died. Gladys Bertha ("G.B.") Stern, 83, prolific, witty British novelist who wrote an average of one novel a year between 1920 and 1964; in Wallingford, England. Stern was best known for Monogram, The Rueful Mating and a five-book family saga, The Matriarch, that became a successful London play and a Hollywood movie...
...such as this that urgency becomes blunted and worn through repetition. Heston, forsaking his granite stoicism for once, makes a properly gruff policeman, but it is likely that Soylent Green will be most remembered for the last appearance of Edward G. Robinson, who plays a cantankerous intellectual. In a rueful irony, his death scene, in which he is hygienically dispatched with the help of piped-in light classical music and movies of rich fields flashed before him on a towering screen, is the best in the film...
...movies about backstage Hollywood, but nobody is laughing at Agent Sue Mengers, who carries on such phone conversations nonstop from a desk piled high with scripts. "They never laugh at success," Mengers notes dryly. As a vice president of mighty Creative Management Associates, Sue Mengers is, in the rueful words of one of her ex-clients, "more powerful than the stars she handles." An overestimation, perhaps, but Mengers' list of personal clients is largely above-the-title: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Ali McGraw, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Tony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Directors Herb Ross, Peter Bogdanovich...
...Sondheim is a quicksilver wordsmith in the grand tradition of Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Lorenz Hart. There are three standout numbers. One is Liaisons (Gingold), a lament that courtesans are not the elegantly larcenous creatures they used to be. Equally arresting are Send In the Clowns (Johns), a rueful gaze into the cracked mirror of the middle years, and The Miller's Son (Jamin-Bartlett), a gath-er-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may paean to the flesh...