Word: 1930s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...current movie The Remains of the Day reminds us, there was a time not long ago, the 1930s, when openly expressed doubts about the wisdom of democracy as a system of government were positively fashionable, even in established democratic societies. These days everybody pays at least lip service to the democratic ideal. Will that change? Just asking...
...late 1930s, an Austrian businessman named Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) arrives in Krakow, Poland, intent on making his fortune. He aims, in his own words, to leave with "two steamer trunks full of money." Schindler is a dazzlingly charismatic man, the ultimate seducer, who, according to Spielberg, "romances the entire city of Krakow,...romances the Nazis,...romances the politicians, the police chiefs, the women...
...used to be that while Las Vegas was unfailingly piquant and over the top, it was sui generis, its own highly peculiar self. Vegas in none of its various phases (ersatz Old West outpost in the 1930s and '40s, gangsters-meet- Hollywood high-life oasis in the '50s and '60s, uncool polyester dump in the '70s and early '80s) was really an accurate prism through which to regard the nation as a whole...
...what it says but who is performing it. The cast of 30 includes equal numbers of professional actors and members of Washington's impoverished Anacostia neighborhood, an area pioneered by slaves working farms they had bought in secret, and so long benighted that some areas lacked electricity in the 1930s. The amateurs are not stereotypical victims or lowlifes: while some come from straitened circumstances, one is a Berkeley-educated attorney, others are students at a selective high school for the performing arts, and one is a former seminarian who does managerial tasks at his church. All were recruited...
...contrast, the scenes in which Schindler befriends the German command, the better to suborn them with bribes and favors, first to advance his own interests, later to protect his workers, are filmed in the high formal style of the 1930s and '40s. The style is as cool and calculated as Schindler himself, played with a kind of impenetrable bonhomie by Liam Neeson. The work here comes close to satirizing the antique conventions of espionage dramas...