Word: shrewish
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...ever majored in what his father derisively calls "colored people's studies"), but it bogs down too often in desultory improvisation and strident soul-searching. They did better in their previous screenplay, Lovers and Other Strangers. That too featured your favorite minority emblems - loudmouthed Italian fathers in undershirts, shrewish Jewish mamas nagging at the small fry and prodding their older progeny to marriage - but rendered them affectionately, with the kind of insider's insight that made them something more than cartoons...
...basic plot is quite simple. Alexander Gartempe is a farmer, a hard-working farmer (because of his shrewish wife La Grande's relentless driving) who has acquired some 300 acres--quite a farm by American, let alone French, standards--which he must cultivate. By himself, of course...
...best of the novellas is a strong and subtle study of growing old. In an anguished narration, a literary woman of 60 (Novelist de Beauvoir is 61) watches herself deteriorate into shrewish fury as her stable world shifts and then resettles, diminished, along the fault line of age. She realizes, at first only with impatience, that her husband is willfully allowing himself to become old. Nothing interests him. He is a respected scientist, but he says he has not had a fresh idea in 15 years, and he repeats the aphorism that "Great scientists are valuable to science...
Androcles (Gene Troobnick) and his wife Megaera (Jan Miner) enter and prove well cast indeed. Miss Miner's role is a short one, but she is properly attractive, ample, and shrewish. Curly headed Troobnick, imported by the Festival just for this role, fits to perfection Shaw's prescription of "a small, thin, ridiculous little man." He has no trouble convincing us of his great love of animals, and is wholly at home in Shaw's amusing baby-talk (such as "Did um get an awful thorn into um's tootsums wootsums?"). The extraction of the thorn from the Lion...
...cynicism. Even the material world is forbidding. Citizens must seek treatment in hospital buildings that may date from the 17th century, archaic highways are jammed, and telephones do not work- a trivial complaint, perhaps, but symbolic of a more profound lack of communication between groups and generations. "Weary and shrewish" Paris, the heart of the country, has become, "beyond question, the most exhausting capital in the world...