Word: schemers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...beauty, she never lost touch with the insecure, self-conscious adolescent inside her and seemed most at ease when playing a zany or a frump. Her great creation was the Lucy character, a Little Scamp who was forever conniving, forever failing, forever meriting punishment yet winning forgiveness. The thwarted schemer was a figure dating back to the Romans if not the Greeks, but Ball deftly sentimentalized the character, merged its cunning intellect with joyously low physical comedy and, perhaps most important, feminized it. Her shows -- I Love Lucy, The Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Show, The Lucy Show and Here...
Manigat's fatal error may have been to shift the powerful Colonel Prosper Avril from the head of the presidential guard to an insignificant desk job. Avril, 50, a veteran schemer with close ties to the old Duvalier regime, is thought to have engineered last week's coup. Promoted to brigadier general after the takeover, Avril is widely believed to be the guiding force behind the military regime...
...make of the right- wing firebrand, inspired by a bottle of ketchup (57 varieties) to invent the number of Communists lurking in the State Department? Or of the liberal Senator who, when shot in his kitchen, bleeds the milk of human kindness? Or of Raymond's silky schemer of a mom (Angela Lansbury), who confides her plot to rule the world, then kisses her son full on the mouth...
Gorbachev cited other historical "nonpersons." Leon Trotsky, an ally of Lenin's who was exiled by Stalin and assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1940, received a brief mention -- but only as a power-hungry schemer "who always vacillated and cheated." More fortunate was Nikolai Bukharin, another close Lenin aide who ran afoul of Stalin and was executed as a spy in 1938. Gorbachev credited Bukharin, who supported Lenin's free market-oriented New Economic Policy and opposed forced collectivization, with helping to frustrate Trotsky's ambitions. Yet Gorbachev felt compelled to cite Lenin's reservations about Bukharin's ideological...
...venality between psycho punks and white-collar killers, to rule a city in the near nightmare future. One exec (Ronny Cox) has devised a robot, ED 209, to patrol the streets, but ED is too slow in the brain and too fatally quick on the draw. So another schemer (Miguel Ferrer) assembles the spare parts of a mangled policeman (Peter Weller), fuses them with some state-of-the-art plumbing and creates a bionic bobby. For a while, RoboCop works much better. Can't be trusted, though. Has feelings and, maybe, a mind...