Word: abyss
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flares of humor. Saved would not be a matter of theatrical moment except that Edward Bond possesses a genuine dramatic imagination and the makings of a formidable playwright. His best dialogue is equal to Pinter's, and he can match Beckett when it comes to peering into the abyss of existence. While not as fine a playwright as either, he has something that the two greater dramatists lack: a keen sense of man as a social being...
...Fukasaku, have managed to move crowds and planes, but not the viewer. They have shown events, but not contexts; national characters, but not national character. Originally, Master Director Akiro Kurosawa (Rashomori) was signed to oversee the Japanese sequences. He might have revealed the complex psychologies that led to the abyss and beyond. Without him, the film is a series of episodes, a day in the death. As for real men and causes, they are victims missing in action...
...Antony and Cleopatra explores the themes that the soldier in love is liable to betray himself as a soldier, that the hero in love is at war with himself. It gives pause when these themes are charitably considered in light of the seeming abyss between war and love throughout history. Shakespeare's original theme is that love can also serve to redeem the fallen soldier as it humanizes him. The power of Antony's death seene, as well as Cleopatra's, is provided by the knowledge that command depends on devotion as well as self-esteem. In Troilus and Cressida...
...Senators for Peace and New Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times depicting the President, the Vice President, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond marching along in their undershorts, presumably leading the country toward the abyss...
...Catholic boys' school. The boys are seemingly possessed by a plague of violence, savaging each other brutally and without ostensible cause. They stalk along the stairway and confront their teachers, lay and clerical, with an oppressively arrogant silence that makes the generation gap look more like an apocalyptic abyss. For better or worse, three lay teachers are closest to the boys. One is Dobbs (Pat Hingle), an American Mr. Chips, a cuddly Teddy bear of a man who sees his boys as substitutes for the sons he never had. His antithesis is Malley (Fritz Weaver), a martinet of Greek...