Word: torpid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Paris, it scarcely matters whether the history is true or false. Librettist Sidney Michaels credits Franklin's successful pursuit of French funds and official recognition to a species of boudoir statesmanship. Despite his celebrated gynecophilia, rare Ben is, after all, 70 years old in 1776, and his torpid romancing of Louis XVI's mistress (Ulla Sallert) has to consist mostly of gallant guff and one balloon ascension...
...three months since its sudden, savage coup against the ruling Arab minority, once-torpid Zanzibar has become an island of fear. Bands of tough government cops, armed with Russian-supplied burp guns, prowl the land in search of "enemies of the state." Hundreds of Arabs have been marched off their property by African land-grabbers; more than 2,000 prisoners are crammed into hastily built detention camps...
...other leads below the elementary school syntax and semantic void which Jonesco's characters utter to the recognition that what makes sense in and of this play is the tone of voice, namely boredom. Not only do the player's voices range systematically from torpid boredom to orgiastic boredom; their words do, too. Nearly every sentence is, by itself, a cliche. Juxtaposed, the frightening novelty of the message of cliches suggests that novel messages are no more than cliches, artfully rearranged. Thus the characters--they too are not individuals, but cliches--break down their own messages and shout the ultimate...
...smiles wistfully. He has done his duty, he has built a bridge to the future. His children will cross it, he will not. He will stay in the past, bound there by affection, by habit, by sloth, by congenital dislike of tomorrow, by the siren lure of a torrid, torpid land that makes its children long "voluptuously for death." As the film ends he kneels and, yearning upward to the morning star, prays passionately for death: "O faithful star! When will you give me an appointment less ephemeral than this...
...Mitchum, 22, has progressed through bit parts to star billing in Carl Foreman's The Victors. He is a heavy-lidded, torpid replica of Actor Robert Mitchum, but with little of his father's suggestion of latent energy and smoldering violence...