Word: blum
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Boll's problem is that this faith in the fact-crazed reporter appears to fade in Boll's latest publication, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Here again, a woman, but not even a woman whose whole life the reporter hopes to track down in 400 pages. Just five days!--from February 20 to February 24, 1974--just five days is all he wants to know about the life of Katharina Blum. Yet even this knowledge is impossible to extract, despite detailed police records and the personal testimony of the woman involved, a woman who, at the end of that...
...Paris. Wounded and captured at Verdun in 1917, the roly-poly, bespectacled Duclos, a baker's apprentice before the war, joined the party in 1920, working first as an agitator among soldiers and draftees, and later earned the reputation of a political wunderkind by defeating Socialist Leon Blum for the Assembly. An orthodox Stalinist, Duclos gained leverage in the Communist International, virtually directed the 1946 expulsion of onetime U.S. Party Boss Earl Browder for continuing his wartime policy of soft-pedaling the "class struggle." After the Nazis invaded Russia, he organized the French Communist resistance and led its August...
...petty fraud behind, and Resnais seems to agree with him, emphasizing the discontinuity between the pickpocket and the cosmopolitan "financier." Stavisky affects history in a way a pickpocket cannot, Resnais maintains; I'affaire Stavisky, when it's blasted out of the water, shakes the Popular Front Government of Leon Blum and forces the deportation of Leon Trotsky, who until then had enjoyed political asylum in France. Resnais asks us to believe that Trotsky could have held the European Left together by his commanding presence--and here I fail to follow him, for it is far from certain that Trotsky...
...Hispano-Suizas; tuxedoes and boutonniere roses; country houses with immaculate lawns; Alps, pale sandstone rocks beneath pale aquamarine waves, and flowers, thousands of them, everywhere. You don't think much about politics in a setting like this, as Stavisky plays ball with Right and Left, bilking ministers in Blum's cabinet with one side of his mouth and hot-blooded Spanish grandees with the other. Stavisky and his entourage attend the famous 1933 performance of Coriolanus in Paris, and though we hear the actor declaiming his lines and listen to the applause of the fascists and the catcalls...
...sounds of fashionable music and unaware of the curfew, Lucien is grabbed from behind by a guard and taken for questioning as a spy. Inside, an unlikely group of outcasts--a playboy aristocrat, a cycling champion past his prime, a colonial black, a police inspector dismissed by Leon Blum's Popular Front before the war--reigns over the hotel in sybaritic decadence. Downstairs is all dancing and champagne; only once in a while does anyone go upstairs for "business"--torture and interrogation...