Word: waifness
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Director Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), a prime mover of the New Wave, exploits his star's Chaplinesque lost-waif charm, but Aznavour lacks the clownish resilience that enabled Chaplin's eternal tramp to give as good as he took from life. A hero who falls to his defeat generates dramatic interest; but the piano player seems to wallow in the complacency of his own despair, as if he were past caring and past caring about. Truffaut's centrifugal direction sends pieces of crime thriller, love story, and psychological case study flying off at unrelated tangents. Moreover...
...looks of a spirited waif. She plays one in Honey-a little urchin abandoned by her mother and by a Negro sailor who has left her pregnant, later befriended by a pale, homosexual boy who prepares her for motherhood. She is freckled and mousy, with wide-spreading lips and eyes the size of deep-summer plums. But she is an actress, not a slum kitten picked up for verisimilitude...
...only significant aspect of 1601 is the date of its composition. For it was in the summer of 1876 that Mark Twain's rage against the restrictions of polite English reached its historic climax: he began work on a novel written entirely in the vernacular of an ignorant river waif. Fed up with literary lies, he wanted Huck Finn to speak not like boys in other books, but exactly the way a boy brought up in the tanyards of Hannibal, Missouri, in the 1840's would have spoken. Yet at the very heart of his determination to be true...
...greater snob than herself ("God is like a very famous person to whom an introduction is impossible"), she says, "Do I have to come at you and cut you down?" She has cut her son (Colgate Salsbury) down to a homosexual, her daughter (Marcie Hubert) to a bewildered emotional waif, her husband (Don McHenry) to a mumbler of prayers in his pillow...
...clothesline, or vaulting through space to pounce on someone's stiff neck with a chiropractical jerk, or cheerily offering to chase the bats out of the guest bedroom, Eileen Heckart is wildly and wistfully amusing. Garbed in the remnants of remnants, she is an endearing clown-waif in the classic Chaplin tradition...