Word: smug
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...earlier puzzlements, Ellery Queen used to enjoy tweaking amateur sleuths by stopping short of the final Byzantine solution long enough to issue a "Challenge to the Reader" to match clues and wits with the smug author. In his newest novel, Stanley Ellin goes Queen one better. He offers the reader a refund instead of a contest...
Inevitably, this week's Republican Convention in Miami Beach wears the joyful and slightly smug mien of a coronation. It is proudly programmed to praise the man who is going to give the Republicans four more years at the helm of the nation, and who will perhaps forge the first new alignment of political power in the U.S. since the New Deal. The campaign to follow looms almost as anticlimax, an exercise in the forms of democracy, though it will be the most lavishly financed and highly organized in Republican history. Yet it should also pose the sharpest choice...
...canoeists have grown gradually more isolated from their smug idea of civilization. This episode of brutality and reprisal severs what few connections remain. Drew (Ronny Cox), the most rational of the four, wants to bring the murdered mountaineer downriver to the police. He believes that they will all be pardoned for justifiable homicide. The others doubt it, finally overrule him, and bury the body in the woods, which along with the rest of the area will be flooded for the dam project...
...eight other defendants look at each other and smile, smiles that convey much of what is wrong with this film of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. They are smug smiles, full of condescension and unchecked theatrical egotism. The movie is extracted virtually as a piece from Father Berrigan's play, which was in turn a dramatization of his 1968 trial for burning draft records. There Berrigan, his brother Philip and seven other defendants tried to reverse the guilt and put the whole Viet Nam War on trial. But the characters in the film seem to be acting less...
...time that messes up both J.W. and the movie. Robertson trots out the usual herd of metaphors for contemporary alienation. When J.W. facetiously gives his address as " 1313 Luck Road," it comes out sounding smug and pompous because the rest of the film deals too literally in such symbolic shorthand, as in the goring episode...