Word: seemly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dominated his work from Diary of a Country Priest to last year's Mouchette. For the first time, however, his central character is something more than a passive, symbolic victim. Her suicide is portrayed as a positive act of defiance, not desperation. Bresson's customary stylistic austerity seems softened by his first use of color film, but what François Truffaut called his "theoretical, mathematical, musical and above all ascetic" approach to the cinema may still seem much too calculated for most viewers. Objects for Bresson are as important as his characters, and he lingers on prolonged...
...Playboy. Sacred cows of all sorts from Winston Churchill to Eleanor Roosevelt are flogged to the abattoirs. Despite some archness and excesses of language, Convert Muggeridge often succeeds in convincing. As he presents them, the Christian churches and their priests-especially the Anglicans "drivelling away their lives"-do not seem good enough, nor the Pope himself sufficiently papal, to minister to the spiritual needs of our bewildered world. The Muggeridgiad stays amusing withal; cap and bells are this prophet's hair shirt...
...issue in Jacobs' bizarre, mainly urban fairy tales. He is essentially a monologist, and his effect depends not so much on the credibility of his characters or incidents as on the incredibility of his language. He is a not-so-ancient mariner of kitsch, whose voyages seem mostly to have been out of the sovereign state of innocence via the borscht circuit. He re-enacts them repeatedly under assumed names in this, his first collection, emerging from a Jewish childhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side, mournful yet wide-eyed, trying to gain his fortune and lose...
...anything that the behavioral scientists and their ARPA friends could come up with. Specifically that meant John Foster, the Defense Department's top research official. Foster's scientific work has been concerned with thermonuclear bombs (he did his graduate work under Edward Teller), and while Cambridge's behavioral scientists seem to like Foster personally (he is something of a Strangelovian cowboy, with a fondness for zooming around at the controls of his own jet plane), it is very clear that Foster puts his faith in hardware, and has little appreciation of the new social science technology...
...found on the side of "stability" and reaction, on the side of the ruling clites as against the underlying population. It may be that this is the result of ignorance rather than of knowledge on the part of the men who guide American foreign policy, but this does not seem likely. We are accustomed to explaining the actions of other nations in terms of the rationally considered interests of the men who rule them, and it is appropriate that we apply the same criterion to our own country. To do so is to discover that rationality is not the same...