Word: billiards
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...card cheats and thieves are constant problems. But Amarillo Slim claims to have surmounted them all. He files his tax return as a professional billiard player and lists his income under sundry commissions. He knows the top cheats by sight and keeps abreast of the latest developments in their techniques and hardware. He has been robbed on occasion-recently he and his bodyguard were stripped naked by three gunmen-but usually the money is returned when the thieves realize that they have hit a man with some acquaintances in the underworld...
APPETITES are large and effortlessly satisfied here; personalities are protected from tension and splintering. It's as easy as "Let's live together." For that reason the personalities in Cesar and Rosalie interact no more profoundly than billiard balls. The dramatic moments simply lack credibility. Cesar, for example, is subject to violent fits of temper occasioned by Rosalie's desertion--but the tone of the movie informs us that these are nothing but outbursts of sound and fury, moving toward no tragic destination, only emphasizing Cesar's buffoonish character. Since such incidents neither shift the equilibrium of forces nor portend...
...conductor were beyond those of any of his contemporaries. On top of all that, he was evidently a likable, unpretentious man of the world, gifted in languages, poetry and science, a fit partner for any woman on the dance floor, and any man's match in the billiard room. Who was the man? Why, Jacob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy...
...Braque's figures lack personality, his still lifes possess it. One finds a whole cast of characters: tables, for instance, run the gamut from the stolid turned legs under The Pink Tablecloth to the drowned and tilted marine landscape of The Billiard Table, 1944-52, to the iron legs of The Gueridon, 1935, flexing gaily like Isadora Duncan at practice...
Perhaps Spring Snow's most attractive quality is a strain of humor seldom found in Mishima. His Tokyo aristocrats are amusingly caught between East and West, lavishly mounting their ancient rituals and becoming expert billiard players. When Satoko becomes engaged, the palace discreetly passes the word that this flower of culture, versed in poetry and calligraphy, must learn to play mah-jongg because that is her future mother-in-law's favorite diversion. As for her fiancé, the Imperial Highness, his only known opinions are on Western music. When his proud mother asks him to "play some...