Word: backwoodsman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Housman did not have Bruce Pearson in mind when he wrote "To an Athlete Dying Young." Pearson, a third-string catcher for the New York Mammoths, is impossible to cast in the heroic Grecian mode. He is a Georgia backwoodsman who can't get the hang of spitting his tobacco accurately, let alone of making his teammates respect or even like him very much. His only distinction is that he has been prematurely touched by mortality, in the form of Hodgkin's disease...
Jutra is creating a mythic figure here, and he gives his mythology the distance it needs to appear large. He makes this backwoodsman a regional folk hero, but at the same time he shows, from a distance, the conditions that forced the man to leave a large family in need of a father. Underneath the surface dignity of a Paul Bunyan figure we see the desperate position of an impoverished man. The irony of this situation depends on the objective and unemotional tone the film has maintained up to this point. If we approached too close to Poulin, his mythical...