Word: shrewish
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...that inspired it. Purporting to show "the realism of grownup, contemporary sex" in America-not in England or France or Italy-Producer-Writer-Director Ben Maddow (The Savage Eye) serves up a mannered little pastiche of urban infidelities that is pure counterfeit. Husband Kevin McCarthy can't stand shrewish Wife Lee Grant, so he takes up with Model Viveca Lindfors, who is the mistress of his best friend Herbert Berghof. Rounding out the quintet, for no discernible reason except to exploit interracial dalliance, is Diana Sands as a footloose Negro photographer...
Wilson sets the Dean in a Bristol madhouse operated by the shrewish Cora Jenks. This overly coarse woman grew rich by exhibiting her inmates, and now, in violation of the contract by which he was committed, she wants to add the Dean to her show...
...highly stylized suicides, seductions, and wit keep it from self seriousness, is delightful. The characters are stereotypes, and the ironies are always pleasant. (Th General's friend, Dr. Bonfant, announces that life must be lived like a cavalry charge, and then goes home to be browbeaten by his own shrewish wife. When Gaston, the secretary, hints that he is falling in love, the General shouts, "You must gorge yourself on cheap novels!" And Gaston replies, "No, sir, on the classics, exclusively. But the course of events is frequently quite similar...
...downhill on a toboggan, crashing into a thick-trunked elm. Viewers who had not read Ethan Frome then got one of the most abrupt shocks ever delivered by television: Julie Harris, seen years later as a survivor of the wreck, her voice shrill, her disintegrated mind making her more shrewish than the wife ever was, and her unweathered face a makeup man's achievement of scarred disfiguration...
Nations at odds often share with taunting children and shrewish wives an inspired instinct for the stinging epithet that penetrates and festers. Arab maps sometimes refer to Israel as "Jewish Occupied Palestine." Russians in the U.N. call Nationalist China delegates the "representatives of the Kuomintang." And for some twelve years since the acrimonious partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Pakistani press, with considered malice and conscientious glee, has called India "Bharat" and referred to Indians as "Bharatis...