Word: stolid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some Commusicals did fit the stolid stereotype--Mikhail and Judit shouting, "Let's harvest the beet crop right here!"--but many have an enduring buoyancy. Grigori Alexandrov's pioneering The Jolly Fellows (1934) percolates with jaunty jazz, Cubist compositions and a Dietrichish blond in a party hat. The amazing Midnight Revue (G.D.R., 1962) is a comically cynical parable about the difficulty of making a musical when your producer is not Arthur Freed but a pack of philistine bureaucrats. We can't approve your film, the apparatchiks sing...
...filled in. This task was largely undertaken by his powerful mentor, John Ford, a director whose sentimental pictorialism masked a mean and primitive spirit. Wills devotes almost as much space to him as he does to Wayne, yet never notices that Ford romanticized not far-darting freedom but stolid dutifulness. He and Wayne gave it near tragic dimensions in the great They Were Expendable, a terrible obsessional quality in The Searchers. Twice (in Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) they endorsed the creation of elaborate lies in order to lend grandeur to this essentially selfless and military...
...could this be? How could anyone have anticipated that despite all the stolid urban grays I had long championed, I would come to be a yellow person? Actually, quite a few people had more or less bet their careers on it, and some of them were hunkered down in this Seattle hotel room. The participants belonged to the 1,500-member Color Marketing Group, the Virginia-based color cartel that has held a largely unknowing public under its sway for more than 30 years. It was the CMG that forecast avocado refrigerators in the late '60s and mauve motel rooms...
...gift for attracting men of position leads her to Juan Peron (Jonathan Pryce), a junta colonel who becomes Argentina's President in 1946. Eva's glamour--less a natural attribute than a triumph of her will--and her urge to help the poor humanize Peron's stolid majesty; they also come close to bankrupting the country, even as they drain her. She fulfills the rock-age hagiography: live big, die young, and leave a memory that time can transform into gaudy myth...
Yeltsin will be out of action, and probably as remote as he has been up to now, until the New Year. As he recovers, he will rule largely through three people. His Prime Minister, the stolid Viktor Chernomyrdin, will present the administration's reassuring face--business as usual. His chief of staff, Anatoli Chubais, sardonically nicknamed the Regent by his enemies, will be the strategic powerhouse of the regime. And the key will be Yeltsin's younger daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, who is the most trusted channel of political information to and from the President...