Word: smirks
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...weakened condition that they will be easy prey for even the laziest lawman. In Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate), Director Bertrand Tavernier has had the good sense to cast Philippe Noiret, the underplayer's underplayer, as his seemingly indolent and ineffectual gendarme. Not so much as a knowing smirk crosses his angelic avenger's face as he sets most of his relatives and friends (including his mistress, played by Isabelle Huppert) on their self-destructive courses. When Cordier draws the bottom line on his moral accounting, two petty criminals, his mistress's brutal husband, his own shrewish...
...details of plot and motivation progress slowly and are often unbelievable. Director Sidney Lumet has over-directed Mason's chorus of legal underlings, who smirk absurdly whenever he cooks up one of his nasty stratagems. What we are left to admire is fine, dark photography of the brown, guilt-stained marble in the gut of a Boston courthouse, and of Boston slush turning blue in whiter twilight; Warden's humane old counselor; and Newman. His voice has the breathy rasp of a drinker, his walk the uncertainty of a strong man going down. We see him playing pinball...
...fine pair. Koromilas is a comically inspired Kewpie doll of a Luisa, sighing at far-off places, and swooning at the word "love." Winchell is a fine foil to this, lending his part the clean-cut earnestness it requires, even if he perpetually seems about to break into a smirk about the whole thing...
...Long Last Love hope to execute a triple homage to his former Galatea, Cybill Shepherd? The film's three ingenues all bear traces of the Delphic Cybill: Dorothy Stratten has the blond hair and the even features, Patti Hansen the mobile mouth in search of the perfect smirk, Colleen Camp the Texas twang and eerie talent for grating on the most placid moviegoer's nerves...
Some older or more nimble Americans (especially those lucky enough to have bought a house in, say, the Eisenhower or Johnson or Nixon years) have done handsomely in the runaway housing bazaar. They went trading through the '70s market wearing that extortionate little smirk that oil sheiks display on the way out of OPEC meetings...