Word: unctuous
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...masthead to you for editorializing the arrogant, unctuous Charles Percy into the virtuous hopeful of Republican politics. Knowledgeable Illinois voters have long noted Opportunist Percy's aggressive ambitions to be exceeded only by his unlimited ability to accommodate. Down with the "gentlemanly C"; for a man of proven principle and probity, I subscribe to Oxford Scholar Otto Kerner...
This is Harlem's heart, and 125th Street is its aorta. Here is Frank's Restaurant, crowded with white merchants at lunchtime, but thronged at dinnertime with middle-class Negroes, who are served with unctuous concern by white waiters. Here is Blumstein's, the only real department store in Harlem, but hardly a match for a midtown five and clime. And here is the Baby Grand, where Nipsey Russell's successor, Comedian Ray Scott, folds his hands, raises his eyes and beseeches...
Sometimes the Duke descends to dismayingly unctuous moments on the bandstand; "I love you madly," he will coo, "and the fellows love you madly too." But such lapses do not deter the musician from his work. When 500 fans gathered at Columbia University last month for the Ellington Society's annual tribute to the maestro, the Duke himself appeared to present the musical offering. "I will now rehearse," he said softly, and with that the aging Duke sat down at the piano for an hour of the finest Ellington anyone had heard in years...
Director Guzzetti is fortunate in his minor characters, for their performances range from passable to very good. Ellery Akers plays Helen as an empty-headed Fanny Hill, rather than a regal queen whose face launches a thousand ships, and plays her well. David Evett's Menelaus is properly unctuous and opportunistic. And Michael Nach's frenetic sing-song servility as a Phyrigian slave introduces the comic tone which diminishes the tragedy of Orestes...
...other stories, notably The Other John Peel and The Firebug, are well told but have the characteristic defect in that Sillitoe's automata of the sub-world are moved to explain themselves in terms of those heavily bearded bores Marx and Freud. An unctuous homiletic tone slops over into the hard-case dialogue as Sillitoe labors to make clear that the allright blokes are pro-Corn and the real rozzers are Tory types...