Word: stepchildren
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...case right out of Agatha Christie, a high-society saga with all the elements of mystery: a beautiful woman in a coma, an aristocratic second husband, suspicious stepchildren and a fabulous fortune. This is no storybook yarn but a true-life tale that has scandalized the gentry. The final chapter began to unfold last week in Newport, R.I., where jury selection was nearly completed in the trial of Claus von Bülow, 55. He is accused of attempting to murder his heiress wife Martha with injections of insulin, precipitating the coma in which she has languished for more than...
...Gallic sensibilities could ever get to it. No Frenchman could truly understand a city like L.A., and that, metaphorically at least, was what film noir was all about. The term was used to describe a slew of films, the likes of Double Indemnity or The Killers. which were stepchildren of earlier gangster movies but which now had a peculiarly fetid air to them--a heedless, languishing cynicism. Noir heroes always talked like they'd been to hell and back and found it was nothing compared to Southern. California. Noir's creed was that we were all small-time punks scheming...
After Howard leaves and until his will mysteriously arrives, the movie becomes a series of vignettes about Melvin's life. His two wives, daughter and stepchildren develop as characters, but serve more as foils for Melvin's idiosyncracies. Some of the family adventures work well--the Dummar victory on a game show gives a wonderful picture of the event's manic nonsense as well as the Dummars' genuine exultation. Some do not--Melvin and his wife's service as professional witnesses in a Las Vegas marriage factory falls flat. Michael J. Pollard, the diminutive actor who played the sidekick...
Meanwhile, inclement weather interfered with the efforts of Ivy League stepchildren Columbia and Princeton last weekend, producing a fumble-filled contest that the Tigers seemed almost to win by default...
First novels are the stepchildren of the book family. Publishers-when they agree to print one at all-seem to run off only enough copies for the author and his immediate family. Which is just as well, since none but the most cavernous bookstores bother much about making shelf space for debuts. The self-fulfilling prophecy is then in full operation: the books fail to sell, and no one is surprised...