Word: venality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...powerful producer (David Puttnam of Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields) and financed by a company (Goldcrest) on the brink of bankruptcy. Set in 18th century Peru, it is a parable of 20th century liberation theology, of religious imperialists (the noble Jesuits) vs. economic imperialists (the venal Spanish and Portuguese). And from first scene to last, it is dead in the water--a logorrheic tale of heroic masochism in which the good guys all wear designer hair shirts...
Doodling as he was questioned, occasionally smiling coyly, Ringleader Walker described a venal world made glamorous by the trappings of a cheap thriller: the miniature Minox camera for photographing documents, the clandestine drops in suburban Virginia, the rendezvous with Soviet agents in Vienna and Casablanca. "Do not squander your money," Walker said his Soviet contacts told him. "Don't buy a Mercedes...
...their dream house (actually, it is a mansion, long on charm and short on viable plumbing), they neglect to check the neighborhood. And nobody tells them their property is located deep in Harold Lloyd country, where anything that can go wrong will and all the repairmen are incompetent or venal...
...often done in the past, Symons sets his "comedy" in a thriving town just outside London, among attractive, successful, venal people. This crowd is all connected to PC Travel, a partnership between mean, porcine Charles Porson and charming, handsome Derek Crowley. The plot starts out with a littering of anonymous letters around town, accusing Crowley of an affair with Porson's pretty young wife. There are two clumsy attempts at murder and then two quite successful ones that occur on a PC tour of Venice. If the terrain is familiar to Symons, every detail is fresh, right down...
...Ford," says Kathi Iacocca, 25, one of his two daughters. "He will take it to his grave. People who don't understand his anger don't know my father." Says a former Iacocca colleague: "He believes in reprisals for his enemies." In the book, Henry Ford is depicted as venal and mean, an almost unbelievably unappealing character. Iacocca asserts that his former boss was paranoid, vulgar, personally extravagant at company expense, cruel and sexist. Many former and current auto executives, including Iacocca's friends, think he was wrong to carry the vendetta so acidly into print...