Word: wording
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Widow Oona O'Neill Chaplin, 52, waited for word at the family estate...
Five hundred years later, the press is still in the classics business; Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Book I, for example, is a recent offering. But the Oxford imprint now spans all of human knowledge, from the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary (floccinaucinihilipilification, the act of estimating as worthless) to tomes as obscure as Zoologist Arthur Young's Anatomy of the Nervous System of Octopus Vulgaris, which sells 15 copies a year. The largest academic press in the world, Oxford has 3,000 staffers working in Britain and in 23 overseas branches from New York to Nigeria...
Even the wretched performances - Mark Lester's prissy portrayal of the title roles aside - are fun in their bizarre way. Ernest Borgnine yells out his lines in an un abashed American accent and bulges his eyes in every closeup, proving once again that he is the last word in screen vulgarity. His crass pyrotechnics are almost topped by Charlton Heston, who turns Henry VIII's death scene into a veritable anthology of hammy acting gestures. Raquel Welch, no fool, sees to it that she is more seen than heard...
Worse are the lapses that occur in the course of the action. Sellon, for example, mispronounces the word "elan" as "uh-lan." And one of the funnier lines in the play--Wyke's remark of his wife, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz"--comes out, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz." That means, I suppose, that she couldn't get Johann Bach to waltz, either. Moreover, any self-respecting mystery buff can tell you that a "mashie-niblick," that jolly skull-splitter, is a five-iron; Bloomfield ludicrously brandishes a driver. All this may sound like...
...treatment of sensitive issues, no probing of our souls' seamy undersides. At bottom, this show is clean. Unbesmirched by ambiguity, wiped of Weltshmerz, it comes to us like a babe, puerile and kicking. No meat for melodic meditation, no erudite arias, no recondite repartee a la intelligencia. In a word--a four-letter word--the book of Lady Be Good is gosh-darn dumb. But like the song says: the production has "got a rhythm, a rhythm, a rhythm" that could make "you all aquiver." The Gershwin songs are great, stuff your grandmother might have warbled in her day, still...