Word: smug
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Philip Barry's Holiday first appeared on Broadway in pre-Crash 1928. In scale, it is almost more of a ballroom-and-mansion comedy than a drawing-room comedy. Its characters, the big rich, are either smug, drunk or edgy, and terribly status-conscious. But the real locale of the play, its temperamental North, East, West and South, is the terrain of Coward, Porter, Fitzgerald and Bernard Shaw...
...demonstrate by their dramatically timely deaths just how difficult both courses are. Much suspenseful, if highly stylized, drama results from the interaction of these characters with one another and with hell on earth. Devotees of the prison-and-escape genre will enjoy anew such tradition-blessed ploys as the smug-gled-weapon bit, sundry chases through jungle and swamp, the operation-with-out-anaesthesia scene, and of course the solitary-confinement sequence...
...difficult for me to join in the festivities. I knew that she resented leading "Adeste Fidelis." I had been glee at the changing of my grade; now I was not smug. She really hated me. And I could blame her. But I hadn't expected...
Though casually entertaining, the movie gives off the smug, unimaginative feeling of having itself been programmed by a computer...
...agreement she made with Alfred Knopf that she was never to be published in cheap editions. Tempus of course fugitted; my The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared in paperback for 250, and the floodgates were opened. But she was left high and dry: unwittingly, by her somewhat smug stipulation, she had committed literary suicide. Very soon, of course, she'll go into the domain, and then we'll see what we see. Personally, I would think your tag "minor" will preclude much of a revival, but it could happen...