Word: smug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...incident in Athens, circa 1963. A Spock-like physician-politician (Yves Montand) addresses an antimilitary rally. As he leaves the assembly hall, he is viciously clubbed by hired assassins as a truck simultaneously brushes past him. Three days later, without regaining consciousness, he dies. Officials immediately offer smug condolences about the "regrettable traffic accident." But a few bits of offal stick to the whitewash. A journalist coaxes a witness into a confession; an alibi springs an irreparable leak. The incorruptible public prosecutor (Jean-Louis Trintignant) remains unswayed by police and government threats. Ascending clues like the rungs of a ladder...
...tightly constructed, more acute. He has a film maker's sense of composition and a novelist's sense of rhythm and construction. The plot of One Fine Day is much like an anecdote by Chekhov. A middle-aged Milanese advertising executive (Brunette Del Vita) has led a smug and comfortable life of reasonable success with his job, with his family and his women. Two intimations of death destroy this placid equilibrium: a colleague is stricken with a heart attack at a staff meeting and the executive himself accidently runs over a construction worker. The colleague recovers...
...magic lay in his ability to lift his countrymen from such petty aspirations -and from such deep self-doubt. Now both appear to be returning more distressingly than ever. No one believes that France, the revolutionary birthplace of modern democracy, has lost all pride and will sink into smug complacency because De Gaulle has gone. Frenchmen have realized, however, that their rating as a nation depends less on one man's words or actions than on their combined deeds...
Durrell dutifully and deftly relates such episodes, customarily avoiding the smug coziness that tends to afflict family anecdotage as a genre. But the boy who grew into a topflight zoologist was always slightly more interested in the doings of four-legged animals than two. At picnics, he was absorbed, not annoyed, by flies and ants. His endless hours of watching in the fields and at the edge of the sea were rewarded by such wonders as the sight of two snails mating. Sidling up side-to-side, each fired out a small white dart on a slender rope that thunked...
Hanoi, convinced that Nixon's delay of troop withdrawals was essentially an empty gesture, reacted with smug cockiness. After the 32nd session of the Paris peace talks last week, North Viet Nam's Nguyen Thanh Le loftily declared that rising American opposition to the war at home, combined with what he described as a near mutiny among U.S. troops in Viet Nam (see following story), would compel Nixon to accept the N.L.F.'s ten-point peace program. A pivotal point calls for unilateral U.S. withdrawal...