Word: stolidness
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Last year's Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hedda Gabler has been transferred to the screen for reasons that remain mysterious. This is stolid, stilted Ibsen performed by a gallery of waxworks. The movie preserves Glenda Jackson's Hedda for posterity. Posterity has no choice but to accept -but it does not have to be kind...
...show's fascination lies in its oddly shifting tone. Almost all of the characters are confused. Mary herself is usually slack-jawed with bafflement-about her sister, who has fallen in with the local massage-parlor king; her grandfather, "the Fernwood Flasher"; and most of all by her stolid and truly enigmatic husband Tom. Though he is having an affair with Mae, a comely co-worker at the plant, he is impotent with Mary. The situation makes him terse and glum. If he can't do it, poor, dead-voiced Mary wants to talk about...
...warehouse in Somerville, I realized that most of the men hadn't been in a classroom for years. I felt presumptuous; these were adult lives I was confronting, not data, and their faces told me more than I wanted to know as glimmers of interest struggled across features usually stolid, blown out, confused, or pugnacious because of the Blackboard, the Teacher, the Drill Sargeant, the Foreman. For me, that night the niceties of clinical description blurred into the broad strokes of oppression...
...refugees' reception has varied widely. In Indiantown Gap, Pa., the idea of a refugee camp was viewed with hostility by the stolid Pennsylvania Dutch residents of Lebanon County. Within a month of the refugees' arrival, though, local sentiment changed. Volunteers offered clothing and blankets and took Vietnamese children on tours of the countryside. Eventually 420 refugees settled in the area. Less pleasant was the experience of the 42 refugees who went to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to work in a candy factory. Complaining of bad treatment, 15 or so of them left their jobs; their employer claimed that the Vietnamese...
...generally and infectiously enjoying himself. In Hard Times, Bronson's role is closer to his customary image: the callous, uncommunicative loner. When this sort of projection does not work (The Stone Killer, Death Wish), Bronson is a Goliath who could be toppled by leprechauns. This time, however, the stolid performer manages to achieve an authentic, scruffy street dignity...