Word: stiff
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...Neal is so stiff and clumsy an actor that he cannot even manage a part requiring him to be stiff and clumsy...
Several days after the interview, I'm watching one of those all-American talk-show. The Dick Cavett Show. As one of his guests Mr. Cavett Show would like to welcome Michael York, currently starring in "Cabaret" with Liza Minelli. Mild applause. York walks on: stiff, uncomfortable, poker-faced in his dangerously British way. Excerpts from "Cabaret" are shown, scenes more with Liza than Michael. As I watch York chat with Dick Cavett, who is obviously as unimpressed with his visitor as the American audience. I can see York getting more and more nervous, as he begins to push...
...pattern like that of the Limbourg brothers, who made him what must be the most famous set of miniatures in history-the Très Riches Heures du Due de Berry. A tiny portrait of the duke in the Limbourgs' lesser-known Belles Heures epitomizes their manner: the stiff figure, kneeling devoutly before a sumptuous Gothic ground of red and gold brocade, the flat silhouettes, the sharp, unatmospheric color and light. The painting is conceived as a precious object, wrought with infinite care. So, too, with the work of the Rohan Master, or an anonymous miniaturist's image...
...threats and demands were to no avail. The government refused to budge, and public opinion was running strongly against the gauchistes. Perhaps fearful of stiff prison sentences should they be caught with Nogrette, the kidnapers turned their hostage loose two days after the abduction. While Nogrette was unharmed by his ordeal, the revolutionaries were politically hurt by what President Georges Pompidou called "an unspeakable act worthy of a country of savages." As the Communists predicted, "I'affaire Nogrette" may well have given the law-and-order-Gaullists new ammunition against the left...
...image of woman was distilled in a title when Arthur Kopit wrote O Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad. Despite ample surrealistic high jinks, such as having poor dead Dad fall out of the closet as stiff as an ironing board, the underlying tone of the play is lethally bitter. The adolescent hero is in the steely grip of a domineering supermom, and when a lupine nymphomaniac attempts to seduce him, the scene more resembles cannibalism than sex. His only destiny seems...