Word: braddock
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Died. Bessie Braddock, 71, retired Laborite member of Britain's House of Commons, where she was known as the "heavyweight champion" for her rough tongue and 200-lb. frame; of a heart attack; in Liverpool. Elected from Liverpool in 1945 and ever after until she stepped down last June, Battling Bessie was much maligned for her antics in Parliament (reputedly including dancing a jig in the aisle, snoring during debates), but earned the love and respect of her constituents for her unyielding fight to improve working-class life...
Often the sons have no choice but to follow their fathers into the hated plant. William West, a crane operator in a coil plant at Braddock, Pa., for example, brings home $100 a week, and he sees no way that he can finance a college education for his eight-year-old son. West asks: "What kind of a future does my kid have when you can't even get a job with a high school education?" In some blue collar neighborhoods, the high school dropout rate reaches 30%?the continuation of a cycle that locks the sons into...
Consider Benjamin Braddock. Raised in the comfort of an upper-middle class California suburb, sent off to a good school, given all the appurtenances necessary for existence at such a place. (A picture of his college room leaps into mind so readily: KLH, chianti bottle with candle drippings, and all.) He comes home, realizes just what sort of a disgusting life his parents and their friends lead, and is in a quasi-cynical sort or existential agony about it all for several reels of film...
Meanwhile, of course, he continues to live in a manner that would be impossible if it weren't for his parents' sellout, hypocritical, establishment, plastic lives. At the risk of sounding like the Midwestern Methodist I am, every single action of Benjamin Braddock's is that of a spoiled rotten (albeit sensitive, self-deprecating, gentle, all the things you learn to value in a place like Harvard) brat. Not a brat in the old sense of the word, of course, not the overtly selfish sort who demands things and his own way, but the breed that seems to flourish particularly...
...really does growl at him -- on the phone, yet. Twelve years he's been married; twelve years of his live shot to hell. That's why Jack Lemmon is able to make Brubaker so much worthier an object of sympathy (or empathy, depending on your age group) than Benjamin. Braddock stumbles through situations picking up the emotional cost with a sort or moral charge plate...