Word: fiendish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Administration settles in and its top people become more familiar, labels are also being stuck to them. Cartoonist Herblock has at last found in Secretary of State Haig a fiendish target for caricaturing that he hasn't enjoyed since the days of Nixon's sinister 5 o'clock shadow. Herblock's Haig is an overepauleted, Napoleonic Dr. Strangelove. Not all the press's labels have been so unfriendly, at least at the outset. Reagan's budget-cutting David Stockman is often referred to as "the brilliant 34-year-old conservative," but as Russell Baker...
...Barnstrom--again, an unnecessary Americanization from Krogstad--a hilarious cardboard villain, right out of The Perils of Pauline. He clenches his teeth, he points accusingly, he leans over chairs menacingly, he rubs his palms in sadistic glee. If he had a moustache, he'd sure to twirl it with fiendish rigor. As Kristine, his long lost love, Kim Bendheim seems vaguely robotized. Their climactic scene together is a wet firecracker...
...other performers fail to find Williamson's easy balance of comic and serious. Nigel Terry, as Arthur, is solemn throughout, and never believable as the inspiration of a people. As his wicked half-sister. Morgana, Helen Mirren is appropriately fiendish. Cheri Lunghix is a competent Guenevere, but Nicholas Clay's Lancelot is a semi-comatose pretty...
...also the year of Edgar Foo Yung, Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, and Singapore Sue. These racist depictions of Asians have returned to the screen and stage as vehicles of "sophisticated humor" in full technological splendor. Hasty Pudding's "A Little Knife Music" and Warner Brother's "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu" featured stereotypic, sinister and subhuman Asian males (played by white actors) who lust after white women. Last month, Hasty Pudding offered us the female counterparts: Singapore Sue (so sweet and soft and gentle, my favorite Oriental) and Madame Sin-Sin, who together seduce and destroy Caucasian sailors...
...Great Impersonator used unique methods for his special effects. The voice of bumbling Inspector Clouseau is swiped from a Paris hotel concierge; in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, a film that will be released next week, Sellers imitates the uncle of his friend Lord Snowdon. Aurally acute listeners to Chance may recognize the voice of Comedian Stan Laurel. Although he was unmusical offscreen, he could become an opera star if the part required it. "Peter couldn't sing a bloody note," recalled Actor Wilfrid Hyde-White. "Yet when he sang Caruso, he took high Cs like Caruso...