Word: splendid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...worked out a fully rounded characterization. He crawls on his belly, he walks with a special bow-legged gait, and he indulges in puling vowels and animalistic exhalations of spleen. He knows how to emphasize the explosive consonants with which the dramatist peppered his part, and he displays a splendid singing voice in his robust freedom song (in which Morris has replaced his high woodwinds with the more appropriate tuba and bassoon...
John Paul does not seek the splendid isolation preferred by his predecessors. Breaking with custom, he rarely celebrates early morning Mass alone, nor does he like to dine by himself. When a Pope strolls through the Vatican gardens, Vatican guards normally keep watch over him from a distance. One morning John Paul eluded them and offered to shake hands with a gardener. Awed, the man put his hands behind his back, stammering, "They're dirty, Holy Father." With a grin, the Pope grabbed the earthy hands and rubbed them on his white cassock. "I know they're dirty...
Bergman, a satirical detective novelist (Hollywood and LeVine) and sometime Mel Brooks collaborator (Blazing Saddles), has a splendid knack for the non sequitur. He thinks nothing of interrupting a tense action sequence for throwaway lines about freeze-dried coffee or The Price Is Right. His inventive writing could not be in the hands of a better cast. Sounding a bit like the bastard son of Bugs Bunny and Humphrey Bogart, Falk delivers his wildest speeches with a cool sincerity that bespeaks true comic madness. Arkin is the wailing violin that accompanies Falk's gravel-toned bass. Together these actors...
...intruding his democratic values and lower-class common sense on Middle European court politics at the turn of the century. Sellers must save his best comic efforts for the prince's role. He makes him into a perfect twit, a gambling, womanizing, cowardly wastrel, complete with an absolutely splendid lisp that is as loonily effective as Inspector Clouseau's fractured French...
...State Department is looking into this matter and we are expecting a report"). The attempt worked, partly because it shocked people; it was still a bit daring in 1962 to laugh at the Kennedy style. He wrote the column in its first years from Washington and had a splendid time unstuffing shirts, though he deadpans now: "It's depressing to read a politician's memoirs and realize how little you got right." But by the end of 1974 the stake had been hammered through Richard Nixon's heart, and Jerry Ford seemed to be doing an adequate job of satirizing...