Word: quaintly
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...period vanishes. Although Depression comes up once or twice in dialogue, none of the locals really has that lean and hungry look. The scenery is so picturesque and colorful that we get no sense of the drabness of the period. Even boarded-up banks in abandoned towns look like quaint tourist attractions. Even with its clothes, cars, and real American accents, the film fails miserably as a period piece...
...momentum of the Watergate hearings has carried far beyond a mere matter in which "others wallow," while Nixon blithely ignores it. The combat over custody of the tapes?even if they are inconclusive?is not some quaint, theoretical argument between two contesting branches of Government. Nor is it a political witch hunt. The dispute carries great portents for basic concepts of justice, for public confidence in the Government and, most personally, for Richard Nixon. If ever recorded conversations were, indeed, of historical significance, the President's tapes are profoundly so?and long before their appointed time...
...thing I can't figure out is why Lindsay Anderson -- he's the guy who made the thing, also made If -- even bothered. It was weird, the movie just dripped honey soup. You know, moonlight and mists and flowers in the field. Elvira Madigan and a lot of quaint little blotches of English local color. Like it was pretty to look at. But pretty and pointless doesn't seem to me to be telling how things really are. I guess Mr. Anderson was trying to be ironic, telling this grubby story like an epic lullaby...
Saul Bellow's introductory sketch of Berryman adds a great deal to the novel. It's a rare piece, full of quaint anecdotes of their shared careers at Princeton and the University of Minnesota. Bellow knew the writer as a man first--as the man whose gruff arrogance was only a cover up for the frail alcoholic who was unable to manage his life and finally had to take refuge in hospitals. Bellow's sensitivity reaches even deeper. For he knew John Berryman the poet as well: the "Huffy Henry...wicked and away" of the Dream Songs, the narcissistic writer...
...public he turns aside questions about it by recalling the day during his freshman year in the Senate when New Hampshire's crusty Norris Cotton asked: "Can you smell the sweet smell of white marble?" No, said Baker, chuckling at the quaint image. Replied Cotton: "When you're here long enough, you will and you'll like it. From that moment on, you won't be worth a damn...