Word: somberness
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Sophia Loren turns up in worthy screen roles so infrequently that it's easy to forget just how luminous an actress she can be. A Special Day revives one's fondest memories of her talent. This somber Italian film-yet another meditation on the Mussolini era-gives Loren her richest part in years, and she responds in kind. Not only is she as beautiful as ever at 43, but her beauty seems inseparable from the soul of her performance. When Loren addresses the camera with this much intensity, no audience in its right mind would dare turn away...
This conclusion is both somber and ludicrous - and no one now writing can juggle these clashing qualities more adroitly than Roth. Also on display are other Roth virtues: an uncanny sense of pacing and an ear for dialogue that approaches perfect pitch. Roth can wring acid comedy from the dishrag of kitchen quarrels. Kepesh recalls a tandem tantrum he had with his wife: " 'I don't believe I am having this discussion,' she says. 'Life isn't toast!' she finally screams. 'It is!' I hear myself maintaining. 'When you sit down...
There was little rejoicing by the Dutch government. Looking somber and tired, Prime Minister Joop den Uyl appeared on television to explain that "violence proved necessary to put an end to the hostage seizure" because weeks of negotiations with the hijackers had reached an impasse. Justice Minister Andreas van Agt, who with the prime Minister headed the crisis team dealing with the terrorists, made his own appeal for understanding of the difficult decision. "I beseech you to believe there was no other way," he said at a press conference. "We tried everything-every path of dialogue that there might...
When he became head of theater at Lincoln Center four years ago, Producer Joseph Papp promised the equivalent of a New Deal for drama in New York City. Last week, in a more somber mood, Papp, 55, announced he was quitting the center to concentrate on his experimental theaters in Lower Manhattan. In language that a bureaucrat might envy, he described his move as a "strategic withdrawal forward...
Just how close are Burns and Carter? Liberals fear that they might be turning into the political Odd Couple of all time-Carter the grinning lifelong Democrat; Burns the somber, smoke-wreathed Republican. Burns, after all, was Dwight Eisenhower's chief economic adviser, Richard Nixon's Counsellor and, though theoretically removed from politics when he was named Federal Reserve chairman in 1970, a close confidant of Gerald Ford's. During the campaign, Candidate Carter rapped Burns' Federal Reserve for its conservative monetary policies. He also made much of a proposal to make the term...