Word: antagonist
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...Welles's moral vision at its most complex and contradictory: on the one hand, he is a repulsive figure--brutal, racist, eats candy bars the way most people smoke cigarettes--and employs illegal methods; but on the other, he cares deeply about people, unlike his self-righteous and priggish antagonist, the Mexican detective Vargas (Charlton Heston) and is always right in his intuitions of guilt. The other characters in the film are marvelous: Janet Leigh as Heston's hopelessly passive young wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor as the owner of a strip joint, Joseph Cotten as a detective, but best...
...place, for good or for worse. You are meant to enter his world of social fatuousness, accept his intimate chit-chat as personal conseil and assume that you possess all the sports cars, villas and yachts that are referred to. As a result, you and your mythical antagonist--i.e., the ever-present social enemy--become the protagonists. The verbal bouts in which you both engage are conducted in two dialects: "pukka", to which you, the sporting aristocrat, are sometimes entitled; and "non-pukka", or common vernacular, to which your "bootless and unhorsed" social opponent is restricted. Fake, for example...
...fate leaves us curiously untouched. Similarly, the zany behavior of his fellows is amusing, but the depth of their need for McMurphy is not even suggested. Finally, there is the problem of Big Nurse, the chief authority symbol in McMurphy's little world and his main antagonist. In the book, a good deal of the tension between them is oddly sexual. In the film, Big Nurse (Louise Fletcher) is merely a prim, quite sexless nag and a symbol only of niggling institutionalism. So nothing of any dramatic power gets going between her and McMurphy...
...Moshe Dayan: "Naturally he has his faults, and like his virtues they are not small ones." She is more lenient with Richard Nixon: "He did not break a single one of the promises to us." Her long time political antagonist, Henry Kissinger, is suddenly embraced for "his intellectual gifts, his patience and his perseverance...
...Robert Kennedy to spring him from a Mississippi jail. His nickname is "K.O."-a reference to his skill and ferocity as a boxer-and he comes on as though the courtroom were a ring. Eyes glinting through his spectacles, muscles bulging beneath his flashy suits, K.O. Hallinan is the antagonist of the team, the one who has seemed the most abrasive figure in the pretrial proceedings...