Word: stolidness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sentimental novel-the childhood love who dies of consumption, the mother who starves herself to buy her son's art supplies, and the chance meeting, when all seems darkest, with the count's fair young daughter. Now and then the prose gavottes giddily from its stolid march formation ("Before his sun of life had reached its noonday zenith, he returned to the inscrutable Infinite . . ."), and the author is too fond of teasingly retrieving his hero from the brink of fleshly ruin...
Oddly enough, Frenchmen are supposed to be very emotional and quick to display their feelings; you certainly wouldn't say so from The Grand Maneuver. The acting was quite stolid and spiritless. M. Philippe, alternately confident and cowed, displayed a rather narrow range of emotions, and I wished at times that he would explode in anger or dissolve in passion, instead of just standing still and raising his eyebrows. Michele Morgan, the disillusioned milliner, was also rather static; it seemed that the director had instructed her to play a long-suffering, cynical woman, and that's about...
Americans, it would seem, are depressingly stolid, unemotional people. When a similar event occured recently in Iran, the populace filled the streets of Tehran, singing and shouting; a bank holiday was declared; and the Shah bestowed lavish gifts upon his happy people. Even in England, the event was a cause for some well-mannered public celebration...
Even in these conventional contexts, the classic theme of salvation by prostitution preserves a little of its ancient power. The power is blunted-though commerce is served-by a glossy production (Pandro S. Berman), slick direction (Daniel Mann), solid but stolid performances, and a script (Charles Schnee and John Michael Hayes) that reads as though it had been copied off a washroom wall. Heroine to hero, with a broad wink, as she glides seductively down the hatch of his sailboat: "You can-uh-drop anchor any time." Motel proprietor to hero, who betrays a certain anxiety...
...Department spokesman in Washington. "We therefore are unable to accept the implications to the contrary contained in various parts of the report." This week, when the General Assembly debated the resolution to decide which Congo faction should be seated in the U.N., other guns would open fire at the stolid Swede. Not the least of them would probably be the Soviet Union, which still longs to squeeze Hammarskjold out of his job entirely. And then there was the irate Joseph Kasavubu to be dealt with. Without warning, the Congolese President, who for weeks has sat sphinxlike in his official mansion...