Word: antiheroics
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PROMISES, PROMISES follows all the hallowed tactics for promoting mediocrity into success. Jerry Orbach is splendid as the tall, gangling antihero, and Marian Mercer turns in the acting gem of the evening as an amorous alcoholic pickup. But the comic tone of Neil Simon's book is bland rather than pithy, and the songs of the Burt Bacharach score are for the most part interchangeably tuneless...
...musical's tall, gangling antihero, Chuck Baxter (Jerry Orbach), is an underling at Consolidated Life and looks suspiciously like a poor insurance risk. His arms seem to dangle somewhere close to his knees, and his face bears the gasp-jawed incredulity of a deep-sea diver whose air supply has just been cut off. What makes him mildly appealing is that he confides his utter lack of confidence in self-abasing little asides to the audience. It is hard to think ill of a man who thinks so ill of himself...
Enervated Limbo. Armah's anonymous antihero, referred to as "the man," works in a dim, suffocating traffic-control center, where he tracks the erratic routing of decrepit trains he never sees. The scene suits his mental state, for he lives in the cheerless, enervated limbo of post-revolution letdown. He has learned the dispiriting lesson that freedom from colonialism does not mean freedom from exploitation-particularly when the new masters are black liberals less interested in tipping the revolution than in driving their recently acquired Mercedes. He has learned that the lusts for both blood and money know...
Unlike James Joyce, who refused to read Freud, or Dylan, who could not listen to Sgt. Pepper, novelist-essayist-poet and Joyce disciple Anthony Burgess has read everything. The prolific Englishman, author of thirteen books since 1949, has thrown it all into his latest tale of a lonely antihero dragging his dyspeptic way through the exoticisms of the Great Mundane. Burgess's greatest creation is Enderby, a wheezing, farting, belching bachelor poet who writes in the lavatory of his filthy flat. Enderby is a Mad Magazine version of Leopold Bloom; he sentimentally feeds gulls and innocently offends all the local...
...best-known film, The Chelsea Girls-it earned $500,000-shows its huge-eyed heroines disporting in kaleidoscopic perversity; in I, a Man, one droll scene shows a pea-jacketed lesbian sneeringly turning down the tomcat antihero. Playing the lesbian in that film was Val Solanas, 28, who last year formed the Society for Cutting Up Men. Her S.C.U.M. manifesto begins: "Life in this society being at best an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system...