Word: bleaknesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FROM its first shots Willie Boy feels bleak. We see a great deal of motion, physical action, without overt emotional content. Polonsky's feelings toward the characters do not accumulate in their figures; they are invested in their situation: they are felt in the separation of figure from background. the exact hollow space that allows each man a certain freedom of action...
...fertile lands, of earth's most favored continent. Then there is a recent image, often seen through air-conditioned automobile windows. Grinning shyly, the fat squaw hawks her woven baskets along the reservation highway, the dusty landscape littered with rusting cars, crumbling wickiups and bony cattle. In the bleak villages, the only signs of cheer are romping, round-faced children and the invariably dirty, crowded bar, noisy with the shouts and laughter of drunkenness...
Floyd has fleshed out the bleak Steinbeck characters, revealed the loneliness and longing behind their failure, and given them music that raises their foolishness, vanity and ambition to the level of high tragedy. The music is extraordinarily singable; its effect is that of glowingly lyrical, somewhat familiar music that one has never heard before. Floyd's libretto transforms Steinbeck's tragic tale of a misunderstood simpleton into a threnody for lost men haunted by a dream-in this case, the dream of a farm of their own. Sings George...
Most Americans still think of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and the Okies who left it, in the bleak terms of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The long drought of the 1930s seared the land, while recurring winds swirled away the topsoil and black blizzards choked crops and cattle. During that decade, more than 350,000 farmers fled the state, leaving a legacy of deserted homes, barren lands and bitter people. In recent years the Dust Bowl has changed dramatically. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, who revisited the region, tells how and why in this report...
...commission ignored the great progress which followed his protest: $6 million was spent on renovation, plans were made for a whole new city hospital, and the budget was almost doubled. Sackett said the increased funds paid for improvements which "have resulted in an almost total reversal of the previously bleak conditions...