Word: halcyon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...used the war-movie genre to satirize itself in How I Won the War, but The Bed Sitting Room, which is funnier and more tightly controlled, makes How I Won look like a warm-up exercise. There has been no director of such prodigious comic invention since the halcyon days of Preston Sturges. Lester throws off sight gags and visual puns like some pyrotechnical pinwheel and molds character actors (Richardson, Roy Kinnear, the superb Michael Hordern) into a virtuoso stock company. But he also knows the value of good writing, and Charles Wood's script is a model...
Even if riots are held in check this year, however, halcyon days are not necessarily imminent...
Despite his eccentricities, Sinclair was a quiet, gentle man who claimed an unexceptionable pantheon of heroes: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. Critic Alfred Kazin called his special quality "combative innocence." Sinclair, wrote Kazin, represented "one of the last ties we have with that halcyon day when Marxists still sounded like Methodists...
...rosy-visioned device most recently revived by Richard Nixon at Miami Beach. An early halcyon-evoker was Robert G. Ingersoll, who orated in 1876 on behalf of James G. Blaine: "I see our country filled with happy homes . . . I see a world without a slave." F.D.R., in 1940: "I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime . . . I see an America of great cultural and educational opportunity for all its people." Adlai Stevenson, in 1952: "I see an America where no man fears to think as he pleases, or say what he thinks...
...promoting the low-priced ($2,073) Rambler-along with a separate $300,000 splash of ads plugging the company's size and zest-American was obviously trying to regain the image of its halcyon days. Back in the '50s, then-President George Romney captured most of the U.S. market for compacts with his hoots at larger models as "gas-guzzling dinosaurs." Though American followed along with other models (Ambassador, Marlin) when car buyers' taste returned to the larger size, and even stretched the length and breadth of some Ramblers, its share of U.S. auto sales steadily slipped...