Word: scamp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...World War II, a scandalous, enigmatic fictional scamp named Pito Perez suddenly loomed on the Mexican literary landscape. He was modeled after a real-life picaresque oddball named Jesús Pérez Gaona, and was immediately hailed as a personification of the national character. Bloody, absurd, splendid, his story seemed to mirror Mexico. The Futile Life of Pito Perez -his equivalent U.S. name would be something like Penny Whistle Jones-was not so much an instant bestseller as an immediate national classic. Its author, José Rubén Romero, became a figure of renown* But strangely, until...
...amoral scamp of a judge (Robert Symonds), a sort of pie-eyed Falstaff in a sloppy judicial gown, prescribes the test of the chalk circle to determine the true mother. The little boy stands in the center of the circle, and each woman holds one of his arms and is told to tug him out. Grusha lets go so as not to hurt the boy, and is adjudged the true mother for acting motherly. The moral: "What there is shall go to those who are good for it." This could prove that millionaires are best qualified to have money...
...lament for lost first love (I Know the Feeling) in a bistro baritone that huskily recalls early Marlene Dietrich. In party scenes, she alone does not resemble a fugitive from a Vat 69 ad. Although her eyes seem candlelit with some private poetry of grief, she plays the regal scamp all evening, ornamenting with a playfully aristocratic touch the shoddy show goods with which Broadway's indomitable pitchmen hope to mulct the theatergoing muzhiks...
This bum, memorably played by Donald Pleasence, is the smelliest, itchiest, un-deloused scamp ever plucked from the rim of a rubbish barrel. Every time he opens his mouth, he picks at the scab of past wrongs and present hates. A wily slum serf, the tramp raises a mock one-finger salute to his masters, and plays the brothers off against each other. They, in turn, offer him the nebulous post of care taker, and finally, in mutual revulsion, cast him out to an unknown fate...
...comparison, Les Fourberies de Scapin (roughly, "Scapin's Knavery") is a farcical hellraiser, with its resourceful scamp of a hero-the traditionally pert and clever servant-engineering a whole repertory of deceptions with a full battery of slapstick. Based on a famous Roman play, Terence's Phormio, Les Fourberies is served up in the famous Italian style of the commedia dell' arte. For their sons' sake, Scapin hoodwinks two miserly fathers-one of whom, as the price of Scapin's saving his life, has offered him a coat "after I've worn...