Word: bone
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...full-fledged imitation of W.C. Fields gone native. Parkins is pretty, and Moore deft and quite amusing as a sort of good-hearted dolt. Director Peter Hunt (Gold) got his start as film editor on the early James Bond adventures and knows how to work on the funny bone even as he stages a punchy scene. The movie hardly wants for plot or action, but could have done with a little more sense. This, however, might have slowed it down or even tripped it up completely. Shout at the Devil is best just speeding along on its own goofy...
...word is ever out of place; his postcards can no more be excerpted than his essays. As these letters reveal, White was, like many humorists, a secret sufferer. For most of his adult life, the writer lightly chronicles a series of illnesses and operations: "They got at the bone through my right nostril, which I consider very resourceful, and the morphine was just what I had been needing all along." In the mid-'40s he suffers fron a mental crackup. His prescription for recovery: "Drink dry sherry in small amounts, spend most of your time with hand tools...
...only violates the mutual understanding within the club, but it seriously shortens his public life. It is unfortunate, however, that the demands of official survival so often conflict with the public's need to know what its government is doing, especially when the cost is measured in blood and bone and shattered national integrity. There should always be a deep reserve of suspicion for those men who merely carried on in the midst of the storm, content to silently watch the course of its fury...
...stark eloquence, they are almost upstaged by the text-also by O'Keeffe. She describes her surroundings in Abiquiu, N. Mex., recalls the '20s when D.H. Lawrence was underfoot. Her voice is laconic, styleless, arrow straight to the point. About one of her pictures of bleached pelvic bones, she notes: "I was the sort of child that ate around the raisin on the cookie and ate around the hole in the doughnut. So probably-not having changed much -when I started painting pelvic bones I was most interested in the hole in the bone...
...novel's form-pursuit and confrontation-owes much to the conventional thriller. But Cutter and Bone is much more than skillful entertainment. The places and people ring true, from the desperate hedonism of coastal California, "where America kept trying out the future," to the Ozarks heartland, where piety and patriotism barely camouflage a native instinct for violence. Cutter and Bone's own story is charged with a kind of passionate cynicism that makes even grotesques seem likable and, more important, credible right up to the last, startling sentence. Philip Herrera