Word: venal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hachette has exerted no depressing influence on the quality of the French press, which has detectably improved since the venal prewar period when the news columns of nearly any paper could be bought. It has been argued that Hachette's omnipresence discourages the rise of new papers. But it is not easy to pin the blame on Hachette. While it is true that newspaper circulation has declined since the war-by 2,000,000 in Paris and a like amount in the provinces-there are many contributing reasons: TV, the new emphasis on leisure pursuits, and even Charles...
Aspire or Expire. Off-Broadway is usually judged by its best efforts, while Broadway is often cavalierly measured by its worst. The present crisis of off-Broadway is that its best efforts are becoming rarer and rarer, and it is being swamped by its typical products, which are increasingly venal, sloppy, and predictable. For every promising Playwright Schisgal, there are a dozen silly spoofs of old movie musicals, or tasteless tours through neurotic junkyards of the mind, or criminal displays of self-ordained talent that might have lasted ten seconds before getting the critical gong on the late Major Bowes...
...actors, however, survive the encounter. Guinness as Prince Feisal is finely serpentine, and Quinn is magnificent as the venal and violent Sheikh Auda abu Tayi, a great black hairy camel of a man who sucks up gold as a camel sucks up water, and then spews it out with a roar of patriarchal pride: "I am a river to my people!" But it is O'Toole who continually dominates the screen, and he dominates it with professional skill, Irish charm and smashing good looks. They are the looks of a healthy young lion: large strong animal mouth, blazing blue...
...organization of American society," writes Paul Goodman, 51, roving lecturer, author and professional dissenter, "is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony, and a baroque state waging cold war against another baroque state...
...only five can pretend to be human beings. What's more, three of the five are stupid and cowardly, and the best of them, the noblest instance of mankind that Kurosawa can discover, is the mercenary samurai-a professional killer. Everybody else in the picture is lecherous, treacherous, venal or criminally insane...