Word: awl
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plot strands, which interweave effectively until the end of the film. The first involves a big mystery case that is assigned, of course, to Lise. Someone, it seems, has fallen into the rather distasteful practice of murdering members of the National Assembly in crowded places--and with an awl, no less. Lise and her squadron of affectionate detectives must find and stop this madman while Paris reverberates with the crimes...
...before the meeting of this preposterous pair that Pride of the Bimbos excels. Sayles has a deadly accurate ear for Southern cracker dialect ("Chick at awl?" asks a South Carolina gas-station attendant); the jabbering at a sand-lot baseball game ("Chuckerinthereissgahcantit"); and the good-ole-boy humor ("if that woman fell down a well, you could pump ugly for a week"). Best of all, the gruff friendship between Burns and the young son of a teammate is successfully played for both laughs and pathos; as it does in all initiation tales, the moment comes when the boy must measure...
Sick Circus. Alfred Jarry was the kind of humorist for whom laughter was a rictus; he dug for the cheek nerves with an awl. The first word of his first play-Merdre! as Jarry spelled it-discovered obscenity as a lisping child star and launched her on her modern stage career. That was 1896; Jarry was 23. His egg-shaped Père Ubu of monstrous honesty, the grotesque Dr. Faustroll with his science of 'Pataphysics and his Caesar-Antichrist are the collective grandparents of the theaters of cruelty and the absurd. As Jarry lay dying...