Word: maladroit
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...happened, Forster, the maladroit innocent, survived to age 91. By and large, he did so happily, as this long, absorbing biography makes clear. Critic P.N. Furbank knew Forster during the author's latter years and was eventually given access to previously suppressed papers and correspondence. Much of the material concerned Forster's homosexuality, and his whole story could not have been told without it. He was one of the great English novelists of this century, but the foundations of his art rested on a buried life...
...Mounties who had been fielding the classic textbook operation: a sting by a double agent. The KGB appeared so deceived by the Mounties' ruse that one astounded Canadian official said, "One wonders-do they assign their better people here? They seem to have been incredibly crude, gauche and maladroit...
...lured to faraway places by low-priced jet packages, solid steak-and-tater burghers have returned home by the millions with tingling memories of the rites and delights of other nations' tables. Julia Child's 1961 book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her superbly low-key, artfully maladroit TV demonstrations were immensely influential in persuading her fellow citizens that serious cuisine is not some kind of Gallic voodoo but rather the art of the eminently possible...
...ungainly and at times vulgar contortions. Yet throughout his eye for "arabesque" (a term borrowed from dance, meaning "overall pattern of line") prevails, and his statuettes withstand his often perverse challenges. It is as if Degas wanted to tease his audience by effecting the spontaneously off-kilter or maladroit, merely to vindicate an operating principle that he summed up once by saying, "Nothing in art must seem to be an accident, not even movement...
...respect for Hitchcock's stature, and his years, Family Plot should be considered as fleetingly as possible. It is a comedy thriller gone awry, vulgar, lifeless and maladroit. The script is by Ernest Lehman, who wrote the witty screenplay for Hitchcock's sumptuous self-parody, North by Northwest. Here the writing is less like satire than putdown. At one point, Bruce Dern, who plays a scuffling actor/cab driver named Lumley, grouses to his girl friend, a self-proclaimed medium: "You've really got me by the crystal balls...