Word: waspishness
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...Picture Show worked because the fifties are where we come from, but here Bogdanovich invokes the whole Great Tradition of American cinema and any critical connection to social reality, if it was there with Hawks in the thirties, has long since disappeared. What's Up Doc? ends up as waspish a comedy as they come. Heroes are clean and Iowan, the villains are the fat, the sexually repressed, the foreign. Barbra Streisand doesn't even get to play a nice Jewish girl...
Coppola extends this moral masquerade even further, using the Mafia as a metaphor not only for cor ruption in business, but for corruption in all centers of power, emphatically including government. "My father is no different from any other powerful man," Michael tells his WASPish girl friend Kay. She says, "You're being naive. Senators and Congressmen don't have people killed." Replies Michael: "Who's being naive now, Kay?" When the Don expresses regret that Michael could not have been "a Senator, a Governor," the son promises him, "We'll get there...
...plays, players and playgoers. These comments lack the pithy bite of aphorisms, and as out-of-context fragments, they lose much of the slyly inflected wit that is one of the special pleasures of reading Beerbohm. The tone is wrong too. Clive Revill employs a voice and manner of waspish arrogance, whereas benign scorn or amused disdain would be truer...
...deepening hysteria for a son, by her husband and King. Finally, we see her as a sick and aged woman, bewildered by events that have taken from her both husband and crown. As Henry's last Queen, Rosalie Crutchley effectively plays a staunch Catherine Parr, a waspish and religious woman with pursed face and stern views on a woman's duty both to Christ and to her husband. Miss Crutchley's Catherine is determined and unyielding as she saves herself from what was becoming the almost inevitable trip to the Tower...
...Mark him well," Diaghilev said of the 27-year-old Igor Stravinsky. "He is a man on the eve of celebrity." When celebrity came, Stravinsky had a long day of it: a stormy dawn of controversy, a high blaze of creative influence, a waning afternoon of waspish polemics and high-priced memorabilia. Last week the night finally fell, as Stravinsky died in Manhattan at 88.* It was the end of six decades of dominance, in which he had incalculably shaped the musical thought of generations to come. It was the end, too, of what Conductor Colin Davis called "a chain...