Word: venality
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...that were later found to have made payoffs; they would have an incentive to look harder if they knew they might be accused of helping the company to conceal a crime. Successful prosecutions of some American executives for bribery might even embarrass foreign governments into tightening up on the venal practices of their own businessmen...
...parents were created for." So observed Ogden Nash, and as if in agreement, Mercer Mayer has produced Two More Moral Tales (Four Winds; $3.50). No adult is needed to explain these textless jokes about pigs who put on elaborate evening wear and then head for mud, or about a venal fox who sells fur coats that are still alive. The Chicken's Child, by Margaret A. Hartelius (Doubleday; $4.95) is similarly pictorial. A chicken accidentally hatches an alligator egg. The green baby thereupon eats corn, pies, wash-tubs and tractors, yet still manages to win himself an honored place...
...when it comes to accepting women on the high bench. In any event, as you may possibly guess, Justice Snow, after suffering a heart attack, has so won his way into Justice Loomis' thought processes that she casts a vote his way in a close decision concerning some venal corporation. That is all the conflict that the drama contains, and it is pretty limp stuff...
...Instead, the movie is one long cheap shot. Honcho of the pageant is "Big Bob" Freelander (Bruce Bern), who is-you guessed it-a used-car dealer. His friends from the Jaycees are variously venal and small-minded; their wives, we are given to understand, are frigid. Big Bob's little boy is caught by the cops trying to take pictures of the contestants in their undies through a dressing-room window. He intends to sell them, of course. And so it goes...
...novels and autographs to painting. But there is something darker at work here: a claustrophobic sense of a century closing in on possessions, values, souls. It is this aspect that Moore slights. He introduces 19th century complications: an involved, but strangely chaste affair, a faceless enemy, a gaggle of venal sycophants. Then he seems to lose patience with these promising elements, and before 200 pages are out, Maloney hurtles to an abrupt martyrdom. The blueprint remains; the major work is never constructed...