Word: shiftlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...supporting cast, headed by Francois Perier as the shiftless husband and Suzy Delair as Gervaise's scheming enemy, is impeccable, and M. Clement's direction achieves its effects brilliantly. In term of motion picture artistry. Gervaise constitutes a nearly perfect effort (although the Brattle's projection technique leaves something to be desired.) Clement's slight humorous touches (which are almost forgotten in the depression of the climax) are masterstrokes: a beggar quietly switching his sign from "Aveugle" to "Sourd et Buet," the ridiculously bad singing of a guest at Gervaise's birthday party...
...Joan. Captain Boyle, the strutting Paycock, is a Homeric boozer, braggart and whine. With a sea-rolling gait and a gravelly brogue, Melvyn Douglas makes him an amiably puckish buffoon but scarcely a Dublin Falstaff. O'Casey's Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life to the I.R.A. Shirley Booth puts a barbed disenchantment in her lines that neatly deflates humbug and windbag alike. But she carries her tragic life more...
...doing the entire CEP program a major disservice. So far, only a handful of students in Government and Economics have asked for tutorial; perhaps next year, if not encouraged, none may request it. And, as is often pointed out, a non-honors concentrator is not necessarily an incapable, shiftless, or uninterested student. He can often benefit from tutorial instruction as much as the honors candidate...
...costumes give it style. If it has almost no Broadway snap, it has even less Broadway brassiness. If this is a Jamaica with little ginger and no rum, those, after all, are largely its exports. From at least a musicomedy standpoint, Lena Horne, gay colors, winning tunes-and even shiftless lie-in-the-sun librettos-are its tourist attractions...
...hero, shiftless, sodden Painter Earl worked for the British until the patriots began to win, then deserted his wife and two children and fled to England, where he subsequently deserted another wife and more children to return to America and drink himself to death...