Word: scoundrel
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...Today Mark Twain's often irreverent notions about God, Bible and his fellow men seem no more fearsome than a day in a college classroom. By the lights of modern determinist psychology, for instance, there is scarcely anything startling in this statement: "Sometimes a man is ... a born scoundrel-like Stanford White*-and upon him the world lavishes censure and dispraise; but he is only obeying the law of his nature. [The human race] did not invent itself, and it had nothing to do with the planning of its weak and foolish character...
...Moral Ambiguity. As Daniels sees it, the Prince of Carpetbaggers was part scoundrel and part scapegoat and, as such, an apt symbol of the moral ambiguity of the Reconstruction period. Author Daniels argues that U.S. folklore has too gullibly enshrined the popular Southern myth of the carpetbagger as a devilish Yankee loot-and-run artist. In fact, he was sometimes a champion of Negro rights, sometimes a businessman with venture capital to invest, sometimes a restless Northern war veteran with a yen to revisit the South. If the carpetbagger's hand was plunged in the public till...
Maritain's love affair with the U.S. is not an uncritical passion. He concludes that Americans are most anxious to be loved abroad, that they feel their lack of "roots" too desperately ("The worst scoundrel in Europe has roots"), that if success does not come at once, discouragement sets in. He believes that, influenced by a "popularized, anonymous positivistic philosophy," too many Americans are afraid to hold strong opinions. Maritain makes a profound observation about tolerance: "The man who says 'What is truth?', as Pilate did, is not a tolerant man, but a betrayer of the human...
...omelet." The makeup nicely underscored Boswell's own assertion: "I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody." The old tiger was even more eloquent. In a swipe at the crusty Scottish father of Boswell (Kenneth Haigh) he roared: "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel!" After a round of bullying Oliver Goldsmith he purred: "Come, come, we offended one another with our contention. Let us not offend the company by our compliments...
Death of a Scoundrel (RKO Radio) often looks suspiciously like a take-off on the bawdy life and gaudy death of Serge Rubinstein. The hero is a fellow named Clementi Sabourin (George Sanders), a bouncy Czech who seems to have spent his early years less on the level than under the rose. At any rate, as the camera finds him, Sanders is enthusiastically engaged in selling his own brother to the secret police in return for a passage to America. Arrived in New York, he steals a rich man's wallet from the tramp (Yvonne de Carlo) who stole...