Word: wordsworth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cukor juggles stock character types and familiar plot complications with playful expertise. Henry and Augusta, along with her lover Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ranson to Visconti (her wildly romantic first lover) held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all, Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. When she finally does deliver the ransom, she collapses hysterically in her now aged lover's arms only to find that...
Cukor fabricates stock character types and conventional plot complications with playful expertise. Henry, the stodgy middle-class bourgeois, Augusta, the eccentric aunt, Visconti, her wildly romantic macho first love, and her present lover, Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ransom to Visconti held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all. Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. Having sacrificed practically all she own when she finally does deliver the ransom...
Aunt Augusta crowds the apartment she shares with Wordsworth with souvenirs of her continental high life, but they give it only a faded ratty elegance. Her dresser-gleams with mirrors, powder jars and pin bowls; glass ornaments flash ever-where--curlicue knicknacks, gold cherubs, and a chandelier like an overturned wedding cake, are cheap reminders of now hollow dreams. For at seventy, she is unmarried, childless, and penniless, and the mauve colored gauze through which she views her world cannot protect her from...
...suffered nothing, lost loved, given nothing, dreamed nothing. Travelling, both to Istanbul and into Aunt Augusta's past, is Henry's initiation into life. As this provincial survives one mindblower after another, stiff primness relaxes into tolerance. Augusta tells him that his legal mother was in fact a virgin, Wordsworth substitutes that woman's ashes with cannabis, he is accosted by whores in a sleazy Paris nightclub while a stripper twirls platinum coated nipples in the spotlights. Aunt Augusta is Henry's wicked fairy--in the beginning a brazen hussy, in the end a worn out bronze he has come...
...confrontation with the universe beyond this planet, and because of that they were awesome. The awe wore off as the television cameras covered each methodical moment of successive flights, but the best of the images grew into a frieze of transcendence, chiseled on the edges of the mind like Wordsworth's intimations of immortality: the readings from Genesis as Apollo 8 spun toward its rendezvous with the dark side of the moon; the "giant leap for mankind" as Neil Armstrong set his booted foot into the moon dust; the vision of the earth from space, a milky sapphire hanging...