Word: speciousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...which others proceed. The physicist should not claim that the artist serves as his technician, for example." Mrs. Wheeler warned that one-sided education is taking its toll today in the newly-independent nations. The young people, trained in technology but not the liberal arts, are susceptible to the specious appeal of Communism. The liberally educated older generation can resist its simplistic thought...
...inhibit Producer-Director Stanley Kramer (On the Beach) and Scriptwriter Abby Mann, who also wrote the 1959 television play on which this movie is based. Ostensibly, four Nazi judges are on trial. Actually, by vigorous and frequent implication, the German people are on trial, and in a specious process that rivals in travesty the show trials conducted by the Nazis, they are found guilty...
Summer and Smoke (Hal Wallis; Paramount). Playwright Tennessee Williams often writes like an arrested adolescent who disarmingly imagines that he will attain stature if (as short boys are advised in Dixie) he loads enough manure in his shoes. In his most famous plays he has hallucinated a vast but specious pageant of depravity in which fantasies of incest, cannibalism, murder, rape, sodomy and drug addiction constitute the canon of reality. Yet Broadway's bad boy has his sweet-mouthed moments, and Summer and Smoke (1948) is one of them: one of the few plays Williams obviously wrote primarily...
Moravia has a ready, if somewhat specious, rationale for the erotic in his books. "It is the result of our highly industrialized mechanical living. Men have been victimized by their technology ... To them the sexual act is the only natural act left.'' It is hard to see Dino, the dispirited hero, as a victim of technology. He is simply bored and always has been. His trouble seems to be that he feels divorced from reality. What is just as bad is the shameful fact that Dino is rich, or at least his mother is. And Dino hates money...
Nevertheless, by sheer theatrical intensity, the film transcends its specious materials. Under Robert Wise's driving direction, its set pieces are socko and incessant. Natalie Wood has the right dark glow as the Latin heroine; Richard Beymer is winsome as the hero, and as a tan teen Tybalt and a nubile Nurse of anything but the usual Shakespearance, George Chakiris and Rita Moreno are strikingly slummy. On-screen as onstage, Stephen Sondheim's lyrics sting like a tongueful of tamales. Leonard Bernstein's music, as usual spinelessly eclectic, fails (as the whole film fails) to merge...