Word: richardson
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...professionalism. It is a collection of long profiles, originally published in The New Yorker, which reflect what the author calls "my abiding obsession with the skills that enable a man or woman to seize and hold the rapt attention of a multitude." His current choices: British Actor Ralph Richardson; Czech-born British Playwright Tom Stoppard; Johnny Carson, board chairman of the American talk show; Comedian and Movie Producer Mel Brooks; and Louise Brooks (no relation), film beauty and sex symbol of the 1920s...
...journalists who actually keep a daily journal, which he employs here as a film director might use jump cuts. He has the panache to handle the first person singular, although the effect can be cloying when he immodestly quotes himself: "Above all, there was the voice [Sir Ralph Richardson's], which I once described as 'something between bland and grandiose: blandiose, perhaps...
...over a fire. When Edwards preached, all New England shook in its boots. But the so-called Golden Age of Preaching did not come until the 19th century, with stemwinders like Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn and Phillips Brooks of Boston. Clyde Fant of the First Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, a former homiletics teacher, notes that even then folks found fault with the state of the pulpit. "Where are the good preachers?" asks Fant. "Right where they've always been -few and far between." By most accounts, the 20th century giant was Harry Emerson Fosdick, who died...
...simple plot, by all accounts, about "a witch who wanted to be human and the gal he witched who weren't true." But, as the good Lord says, those who know not of what they speak should shut the hell up. Who, after all, are these men, Howard Richardson and William Berney, who pervert morality onto a framework that cannot stand its weight? It's an exhausted tale of witches and lovers and hillbillies, a sinnin' and a rollin' in the hay and a borin' you to tears. And you the congregation knows what will happen and have no reason...
Somewhere in this melange of mysticism and morality lurks some talent. But the actors don't have a prayer in the hands of Richardson and Berney. As the midwife says to the ailing sinner, Barbara Allen, lying on the bed after bearing her witch-child, "It ain't yer fault. It were the fruit of yer husband. There weren't nothing you could...