Word: aristocrats
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dialogue -only song, dance and wallflower vignettes. A forlorn aristocrat fishes his monocle out of a champagne glass, fixes it in his eye, and one bubbly tear slides down his face. A 1930s hard-boiled hero, based on the young Jean Gabin, reappears 20 years later as the aging Gabin's Inspector Maigret. There is plenty of verve here but little charm; the relentless closeups favored by Director Ettore Scola (A Special Day, La Nuit de Varennes) turn every character into a comic-pathetic gargoyle. It is left to the nostalgic sound track to evoke the emotions...
...that all this local color doesn't include some serious issues. Lauren confronts quite a few of them as she works her way from suspect to suspect: the South Africa divestiture movement, the Black tables in the Union, a young Richmond aristocrat struggling with his homosexuality. None of it particularly fazes Lauren, who comes across as a sort of Nancy Drew with high SAT scores...
...Aristocrat," as used by Americans about Americans, may be the most abused word in American English. This could be the main dilemma facing the redoubtable chronicler of Britain's titled nobility, Debrett's Peerage, which has set out to publish a ten-volume series on the American aristocracy. Debrett's editor, Martin Stansfeld, an untitled Scot who attended Eton and Oxford and whose family "goes back to the Normans," explains that the series will concentrate on "the glittering star system of America's social leadership...
...bereft of narrative and description. The evening demonstrates only one astonishment. Edward Duke, the entire cast of Jeeves Takes Charge, is a festival of upper-class twits, from the harrumphing members of The Drones, young Bertie Wooster's club, to the nattering dames, to the one true aristocrat of Wodehouse's canon: the immortal, if tiresome Jeeves...
Hemingway made it his happiest hunting ground. Isak Dinesen, in Out of Africa, compared it to England in the 18th century, when an aristocrat might possess a "lovely landscape and a multitude of servants." For Cyril Connolly, however, the East African colony of Kenya was no paradise lost. It was the site of a 1941 murder that obsessed the British essayist and critic for a decade. By the time Connolly died in 1974, he had come tantalizingly close to finding the answer to the question that had mesmerized two generations of colonial society: Who shot Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl...