Word: age
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...turbulent present caught up with the age-old ways of the Batonga. In Salisbury, the decision was made to build a dam across the Kariba gorge to get the power needed for heavy industry and the copper mines. The dam would turn the Gwembe Valley into the world's largest man-made lake, storing 130 million acre-ft. of water-more than the combined capacity of the Shasta, Hoover and Grand Coulee dams in the American West. Soon the Kariba gorge, which had been inhabited only by crocodiles, hippos and an occasional Batonga hunter, echoed to the roar...
...sets to work-it is 1939-with a younger Depression-age writer who has admired Halliday's books but quarreled with his values. But beyond having no stomach for short-order hackwork, Halliday has no resources. Daystpass in California and New York as he fishes for ideas in water that has gone over the dam, as he tosses crumpled typewriter paper after crumpled memories, as he struggles against a deadline that is indeed an obituary...
With Jason Robards Jr. impressive as a collapsing standard bearer for his era and vocation, and with George Grizzard excellent as the younger writer, the main narrative has many moments, such as Halliday's proud roll call of Jazz Age names, that are vibrantly nostalgic, as it has others, such as Halliday's white-knuckled attempt to summarize a scenario that has never been written, that are tensely moving. Elsewhere, at times, the main story is wordy and under-dramatized. Despite Rosemary Harris' period appeal as the wife, the flashbacks seem inadequate, do more to catch...
...tarnished and messy, and too much of a mind for both. So crammed is his scene with lives near precipices and gutters as to cry out for someone merely in a rut. His people, as they talk and philosophize, become embarrassingly florid. His heroine is both a Jazz Age and a Beat Generation type: the self-pitying, self-dramatizing, greedily restless girl who destroys others on the way to destroying herself. But the play's realistic-romantic approach to her is blurred and unsure...
...reserve. The overall effect of Pollock's overall-painted patterns, said the Spectator soberly, was "neurasthenic dazzle." Yet even the New Statesman's gloomy John Berger had at last swung to Pollock's side, comparing him to Actor James Dean as an unhappy genius in an age out of joint. Berger's best guess on Pollock's approach to art: "In desperation he made his theme the impossibility of finding a theme. Having the ability to speak, he acted dumb...