Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After 97 years under British rule, Basutoland is due to receive its independence next year. Its position is hardly enviable. A bleak highland waste, inhabited almost entirely by blacks, Basutoland (pop. 900,000) has no industry, few raw materials and only the most rudimentary agriculture. It is totally dependent on South Africa, which completely surrounds it: most of its working-age men can find employment only in South African mines and factories, and the money they send home -roughly $2,800,000 a year-is its greatest single source of income...
...PAWNBROKER. Rod Steiger gives a virtuoso performance as an embittered old Jew whose memories of concentration-camp horror counterpoint the bleak daily grind of his pawnshop in Spanish Harlem...
...with his wife and two sons, enjoys cockfighting and baseball. He is painfully shy among strangers, speaks only Spanish, and seldom says much. But he is a devout Catholic in a part of the world where males pay little attention to their religion, and he regards Communism with a bleak, uncompromising hatred. As commander of the military training establishment at San Isidro airbase, he instituted mandatory Sunday Mass for recruits, taught courses in how to spot Communists. He also has at his disposal a sizable chunk of the Dominican Republic's firepower: eight F-51 propeller-driven fighters, eight...
Stalin called his tyranny "democratic centralism." The most irremediably bleak and oppressive of the European satellites, East Germany, styles itself the German Democratic Republic. For that matter, all the satellites are fond of calling themselves "peoples' democracies." That tag was adopted by Indonesian Dictator Sukarno after he gave up the patently absurd mislabel of "guided democracy"-which has now been picked up by Malawi President H. Kamuzu Banda, who explains blandly, "I am a dictator by the will of the people." Southern Rhodesian Premier Ian Smith, busy developing a political hammer lock to keep some 250,000 whites...
...juices of a slum that breeds thieves, spivs, prostitutes and all their prey. Then in flashbacks-some spliced subliminally into the narrative two or three frames at a time, others developed in excruciating detail-Lumet adroitly dramatizes the agony of memories. Sunning himself on a lawn in a bleak outpost of suburbia where he lives with relatives, Nazerman's mind melts back to an idyllic day in the old country with his wife and children. In a teeming subway, he suddenly sees the boxcar-prison where his son was trampled underfoot. In the pawnshop, when a Negro harlot strips...