Word: vulgarian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shuttling between the intriguing past and the insipid present, Richard Young, a priggish fellow, attempts to keep his vulgarian wife ignorant of his new time travel kick but succeeds only in riveting her-and a wary community's-attention upon his strange behavior. Du Maurier's view of both modern and medieval marriage is remarkably waspish, but it is this very connubial bitchiness that keeps the novel from a routine Gothicism and makes it a stylish, contemporary entertainment...
...Products. By comparison, Tillie's life has hardly any fizz at all. Serious, well-trained in sociology, she meets a gimp-legged skirt-chaser and hopeless vulgarian named Pete Seltzer. His public wit runs to doubletalk and the invention of nonsense "end" products: after-shaving mints, dietetic shampoo, reversible mayonnaise. "He thinks Cameroons are some kind of cookie," she reflects bitterly. But they marry anyhow and live together until their nine-year-old son dies of lingering leukemia...
This confusion is not unentertaining. Much is going on, and much of it is extremely funny. The performances, particularly Stephen Kaplan's as the Lone Star vulgarian next door, and Sheila Hart's as a late version of the French stage type of perky maid-servant (with an outlandish Swedish-Down Home accent), are both hilarious and determinedly enigmatic...
Monster Misery. How could such a vulgarian be capable of producing good movies? Some of Cohn's detractors reply with the old saw about flowers springing from dunghills. Author Thomas conversely believes that Cohn's toughness was merely an act to keep his vulnerability and sensitivity from showing. The truth probably lies somewhere between. Cohn was a merchant. He made more than his share of shoddy products: the Blondie series, Boston Blackie, Crime Doctor. But the B pictures earned profits and gave Columbia a chance to trade up. It meant acquiring quality merchandise, and often Cohn paid...
...Peking camouflages rivalry between two great if unequal powers. Mao's pride in his ideological subtlety and his own Chinese Communist revolution-which he accomplished largely unaided by Russia-obviously mingles with his pride in an ancient culture and his contempt for Khrushchev as a belly-slapping vulgarian...