Word: tailor
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Similar misfortune has befallen The Angel Levine, Bernard Malamud's pithy and whimsical parable of an elderly Jewish tailor and his war with God. In the film Zero Mostel portrays Mishkin, a decrepit, latter-day Job on whom God has visited terrible plagues. His Manhattan shop has burned to the ground while insufficiently insured. His wife Fanny (Ida Kaminska) is on her death bed and driving him meshugge (crazy) with petty demands. His back is killing him and-ah, cruel Jehovah!-his only daughter has married an Italian. His faith is moribund, and to revive it an unlikely angel...
...early scenes contain some wildly funny dialogue-most of which has been taken directly from Malamud's story. Mostel is especially entertaining doing the tailor-on-the-roof routine that is his forte. But even Zero's comic genius cannot carry the lugubrious sermonizing about black-Jewish relationships and the mawkish comedy that goes with it. In a reverse insult, Levine calls Mishkin "nigger," to which Mishkin replies, "This is the way a Jewish angel talks...
Gentleman Georgy. Meredith was born in 1828 into an identity crisis. The son of a bankrupt tailor who married the family cook, he was brought up so properly by more respectable relatives that he came to be known as "Gentleman Georgy." There were further confusions...
There is a sadness in Nilsson's work too, but, like the great tragic clowns, he feels that he may as well put on a cheerful front until proved wrong. His specialty is the melancholy ballad delivered with an upbeat melody. Mr. Tinker, for example, is about a tailor whose life has passed him by. "It isn't easy for a tailor/When there's nothing left to sew" goes one of its lines. The lyrics may be sorrowful, but the music is pure devil-may-care...
...resign several times over what he considered to be the company's wrong-headed diversification policy. In 1965, Billera took over as president, and set out to put his own ideas into effect. He had already had a successfully diverse career. The son of an Italian immigrant tailor, Billera grew up on New York's Lower East Side, worked as a railway-station porter and semipro basketball and baseball player. He also attended night classes at City College of New York, earning a degree in business administration. Today his salary is $122,000 a year. "I stopped working...