Word: americanizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director-Writer Robert Benton and his cast have made their own Scenes from a Marriage-a domestic drama that starts at a wrenching pitch and builds and builds to the threshold of pain. Yet the film is not imitation Bergman; it is, above all, peculiarly American. Adapting a popular novel by Avery Corman, Benton tells an unpretentious story that might well have served such vintage Hollywood tearjerkers as George Stevens' Penny Serenade and King Vidor's Stella Dallas...
...course, the first film to deal with these issues. A number of American movies have re-evaluated the roles of men and women throughout the decade. The cycle began when Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge and Paul Mazursky's Blume in Love first used comedy to expose the hypocrisies of the bright but sexist American male. After the women's movement took hold, films like Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman went further by trying to spread a new, liberated feminine ideal to a mass audience...
...stretch of the movie and well illustrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that "action is character." Together these two actors-one a movie star, the other a little boy with no previous acting experience-create what is probably the most credible father-son relationship ever seen in an American film. As Ted and Billy slowly come to terms with each other, there is none of the cuteness or sentimentality that so often clots movies about parents and children...
Benton gives Kramer vs. Kramer its lifelike quality by clearing away the artifice that most American film makers use to shape human experience into so-called entertainment. His screenplay strips away unnecessary detail and background from Gorman's novel; his direction concentrates on the characters' feelings above all else. Music is never used to heighten a scene, and the camera moves only when the actors' wanderings force it to do so. Benton's focus is so tight that Kramer shows a far more domestic and grittier view of Manhattan than the Allen and Mazursky films...
...activate a so-called cross default clause and foreclose on the Iranian government in court for the remaining $200 million, or to refloat their share of the loan independently of the U.S. banks. Said one angry European banker: "This is a dangerous escalation of the financial war that American banks are waging against Iran...