Word: smugness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...province of the lower middle class. A number of recent studies have demonstrated that racism--outside of the South--manifests itself at comparable rates in all classes. So as All in the Family tiptoes into virgin territory, it is dangerous if allowed to stand alone. The show feeds the smug, self-satisfied feelings of middle and upper-class audiences--who are as statistically as racist as Archie--but do not express their bogotry in such raw terms. Perhaps it is all right to have Archie worry about the 'coons' moving into his neighborhood, but let's also have Beaver Cleaver...
...casual viewer will be able to deduce that this film is a comedy only by sitting through the long pauses between lines, watching the actors play funny-face. Pocket Money is full of an infuriatingly smug cuteness that adds up to drastically short change for the price of a ticket...
...Harold Pinter has laid a series of booby-traps and land mines designed to destroy the categorizers, rationalizers and explainers in every audience. The Homecoming is Pinter's declaration of war on our tendency to assume that we know what is real and what is unreal, and on our smug assurance that we can analyze why people act as they...
...craving for a thousand decibel dry hump. And Howard Wales' sterile charade delivers: drum solos with all the pulse of a seconal addict; keyboard work with all the sensuousness and imagination of a computer print out; treacly singing; the stage presence of a sloth; and above it all in smug squalor was the ego of Wales, ballooning over the audience with all the magnificence of a slug in heat...
...woes of the others seem somehow pathetic and finally enervating, partly because they are so deeply selfish. If nothing else, Miss Murdoch has pulled one new switch in this book by replacing the complacent American, so often a carefully drawn figure in British comedy, with a cast of smug Englishmen whose horizons have shrunk to little-England dimensions...