Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...bizarre story, written by Playwright Robert Shaw,* is packed with comedy that is by turn bleak, black and breezy, but essentially it deals with identity: the identity of Jew and German, the persecuted and the persecutor, and of Christ as expiator. Arthur Goldman, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, has immigrated to New York, where he has become a real estate millionaire. A strangely mixed character he is: gross, vulgar, warm, arrogant, funny, zestful. He is also strangely troubled, apparently fearful that he is being pursued by a man named Dorff, who had been a Nazi SS colonel...
Privilege. In The War Game, British Director Peter Watkins offered one possible direction for England in "the near future": a civilization getting on by animal instinct following an atomic war. Privilege proposes an equally bleak alternative: a society still outwardly human, groveling in stupor before a cheap messiah. This pseudo savior is a moronic pop singer who combines the sequinned splendor of an Elvis Presley with the sullen magnetism of a Bob Dylan, draining adoring audiences of emotion and common sense with his bathetic keening...
Bolivia is a bleak place that-in its 142 years of independence-has gone through at least as many different governments. With chronically rebellious students and tin miners to keep an eye on, and now guerrillas, Barrientos may sometimes feel that yet another change of government may be looming just ahead...
...overall picture of employment opportunities in the Roxbury-North Dorchester-South End areas of Boston was bleak and unencouraging. Because if the persistently high rate of unemployment and under-employment, several residents suggested that vigorous implementation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dealing with equal employment opportunity might bring some relief to the chronically unemployed...
...human condition, that the thin but unwavering voices of his forlorn characters speak the ultimate statement of affirmation, if only because the merest attempt at communication is itself affirmation. His crit ics believe that no literary bridge can be built on so shaky a foundation. Looking out across his bleak, windless landscapes, they see nothing but nihilism...