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This is the message that Ridley Scott chose for his movie: Rome has been taken over by a foppish, effeminate class of men in perfumed silks.

As a boy, I must have intuited that what was foppish about Lynde, Reilly and Taylor coursed through me, too, even without the words to explain why.

“He cultivated a kind of foppish screwball persona to go along with his acerbic pen.”

Hoult and Cage sell the toxic odd-couple dynamic well, but a sturdier story is required to fully support their performances, especially Cage’s operatic Dracula, who delights in terrorizing his foppish familiar.

Onstage, the band dressed in the sort of foppish outfits favored by several other white acts of the mid-1960s: knee-high socks, short ties, floppy collars.