Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Angels is a French film about two people who play roulette, all the time. Like its American counterparts about pool and poker, this could have been a tight, dirty little movie about people whose lives are built around gambling. Or it might have used the casino-world as a background for sharp social criticism. Working from both conceptions, director Jacques Demy tries to support a statement about psychology, love, and the malaise of Western Europe on the spindle of the spinning black wheel. But because Demy presents neither the development of the characters nor the dynamics of the game...
...world outside the casinos is hard and unreal, the internal gambling life is distorted and uninteresting. Occasionally Jeanne and Claude make self-conscious speeches about why they gamble: because it is exciting, vital, and passionate (winning streaks get musical background). But by making his characters play a roulette of hunches, Demy ignores the great tension in gambling between the desire for rational control and the hope of accidental success. Claude and Jeanne never play a "system;" they win in runs on single numbers, at odds of 36-to-1. "Play 17," he tells her. "Why," she asks...
...recommended to the Faculty in October that students be asked to meet the requirements for an upper-level course in the Natural Sciences as well as to take two middle-group departmental courses. It was expected at that time that background in calculus you'd be required for all upper-level courses in the Natural Sciences...
...been suggested, without critical words about anyone else. He's not. Schlesinger's Lyndon Johnson is unhappy at his treatment by Kennedy aides, and opposed to administration tactics on Vietnam, the civil rights bill, and the wheat sale to Russia. "He seemed to have faded astonishingly into the background and appeared almost a spectral presence at meetings in the Cabinet Room." His Chester Bowles "dissipated his authority by diffusing his energy." His Nehru is a tired, tedious old man. There are also a surprising number of critical passages about Kennedy, some of them of un-expected bluntness...
...more formidable than I had expected." Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is a "tough, courteous and humane technocrat, for whom scientific management was not an end in itself but a means to the rationality of democratic government." White House Aide McGeorge Bundy, "in spite of the certified propriety of his background, had an audacious mind and was quite capable of contempt for orthodoxy." No one rates more admiration than veteran Diplomat Averell Harriman, "who said what he believed and cared not a damn for anything but getting the policy right." He was known among Foggy Bottom types as "the Crocodile," reports...