Word: ballade
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...greasers' turf is the north side of Tulsa: the socs occupy the south. But The Outsiders' sensibility is operatic enough to make the film into another West Side Story. From its first frames, when Stevie Wonder croons a pop ballad over images of suburban sunsets, Coppola sets the tone of poetic realism, Hollywood style. The greasers, with their sleek muscles and androgynous faces, display a leonine athleticism as they move through dusty lots or do a graceful, two-handed vault over a chain-link fence. Their camaraderie is familial, embracing, unselfconsciously homoerotic. Left to their better selves, they...
...kind, a series of longshot landscapes that dwarf the actors. But with his jeweler's eye for casting and a fond patience with his actors, he allows every performance in Tender Mercies to shine through the visual clichés like the home truth in a country ballad...
...have given themselves battlefield noise and nerve with bagpipes, making the "our song" of the regiment, the tribe, stirring up the blood. The pipes have their wild rhetoric. It may both stiffen and imprison the spirit. Sometimes people cannot escape from their songs. The Irish gift for the instant ballad that glorifies this afternoon's martyr will ruin a human heart and turn children into killers, the heroes of tomorrow's pub songs...
Lightness is the key to Red All Over, which shares with current releases The Nylon Curtain by Billy Joel and Nebraska by Bruce Springstcer an emphasis on the lunacy and pathos of daily American life. In "work song," strong vocals power an emotionless ballad which is somehow Russian-flavored, evoking the Brothers Karamazov singing capitalist work hymns. The music is effective and lively, the repeated lyrics "I've got a quite important job with many things to do my stenographer is pretty and my wallpaper is new" come across with just the right amount of subdued pride to make "work...
...this, her only novel, Porter overreached herself. She possessed neither the scholarship nor the profundity to write a fable of the decline of the Western world. But as a short-story writer, she achieved the violent grace of a folk ballad. Something atavistic, something frontier-Texan came out in her. The sentences cut, like the wife's knife stabbing her husband's lover in "Maria Concepcion," like the farmer's ax splitting the head of his tormentor in "Noon Wine...