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...days things were almost better. Compared with Hollywood's caricaturing of other minorities, the industry's treatment of Hispanics was benign. In the silent era of the Latin lover, actors named Ricardo Cortez, Antonio Moreno and Ramon Novarro all wooed Garbo on screen. In the '30s and '40s, Hollywood called on Cesar Romero, Gilbert Roland or Ricardo Montalban for Continental elegance and rewarded them with careers as durable as Corinthian leather. Even those two camp goddesses of the '40s, Carmen Miranda and Maria Montez, did not wallow in the spitfire stereotype so much as they exploded it, with...
Have you noticed that baseball players are getting better looking? The old style -- paunchy Babe Ruth, ferrety Bob Feller, the sunken Dust Bowl visages of players in the '30s -- has surrendered to today's sleek, chipper California look. Keith Hernandez, Dave Righetti, Jose Canseco, Dale Murphy, Rafael Palmeiro and a hundred others have the handsomeness of soap-opera stars. And their fine swagger italicizes the sexiness of contemporary sport. These guys know they're the studs of summer...
Confused? Screenwriters Pierson and Rubel hope you'll be, at least at first. They want you to be seeing double before you've settled in your seat. Fanciers of '30s screwball comedy may chafe at this film's substitution of efficiency | for energy, of speed for style; they may yawn at an old mirror-image routine that Midler essays, which is lifted from Silent Comedian Max Linder and the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. But Big Business was designed as a compact car, not a classic. Once Director Jim Abrahams (Airplane!) hot-wires the mechanism, the plot takes care of itself...
...back, though, flash back more than 20 years ago to the start of the 1960s, when America stood teetering over an edge. When change was not just in the air--it was the air, a viscous entity seeping through every hip person's brain. Wolfe, then in his early 30s, could not get enough of this potent elixir--something new, something different--and so his first essays were published. Sure, writing like it had been seen before, but never with such punch, such pizazz, such daring. Wolfe arrived on the crest of a wave, a wave that never fell...
Like Rybakov himself, Sasha Pankratov, the student hero of Arbat, lived in the capital's bohemian Arbat district during the '30s. Also like Rybakov, he was arrested on a trumped-up infraction and sentenced to three years in Siberian villages. These are not the feared Gulag but the world of administrative exiles living on odd jobs and packages from home. Sasha becomes an itinerant farmhand and because of his good looks has little trouble keeping warm on cold nights...