Word: spiv
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...asphalt-jungle cats, they live in "the land of no holds barred"-a grey, womanless room in a grey, womanless house. The father (Paul Rogers) is a bull walrus spuming through yellowed tusks against the dying of his authority. The older brother, Lenny (Ian Holm), is a dapper spiv of a pimp with a lively, corrupt intelligence. Joey (Terence Rigby), the younger, is a dub of a prizefighter, a would-be champion with a chimpanzee brain...
Unhappily, the film too often has that very effect on the onlooker. True, Michael Caine (The Ipcress File) plays the sodding little spiv with a raucous charm that makes Alfie seem more interesting than he actually is. And it is also true that the script struggles loyally to endow Alfie with humor and humanity. After the friend's wife undergoes an abortion-a scene that takes place off-camera but was only with reluctance approved by the Valenti office-Alfie stares in horror at the unseen fetus of his unborn son. The audience is clearly expected to conclude that...
Meanwhile, the British enact high military farce; the war has lost its point, and the rear echelon is a jungle of red tape and "bumf" in which the conniver, the spiv and the apple polisher win the pips, the crowns and the privilege. Ennis is fatally handicapped-and funny-not because he is himself farcical but because he is serious-about love, about music, and about the postwar world. Gallantly, he survives each pratfall (even when ordered to take a class in elementary shorthand when he should have been waving his long hands over an orchestra sawing...
...such luck. The ape woman dies in childbirth. The spiv, robbed by a cruel fate of his bearded breadwinner, faces destitution-or even employment. But at the last minute he is saved by a master stroke of showmanship: he discovers that the public, which paid good money to see the ape woman alive, will also pay good money to see her dead...
...Woman remains a lacerating and hilarious piece of misanthropy. The wedding procession, at which the bridegroom crassly compels the bride to regale the jeering crowds with a singing commercial for herself, will make most spectators shrivel with shame for their species. And the wedding-night episode, in which the spiv heroically forces himself to remember the lady's financial attractions and forget about her hairy shoulders, is simultaneously grotesque and burlesque...