Word: brutalize
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...favorite son and eventual heir. It may well be the most difficult role of the film. Michael begins as a war hero and college boy who insists on retaining an identity separate from the Corleone "business." He ends as a remorseless Don who conducts family affairs with brutal efficiency. This development is only implicit in the script, never stated outright. Pacino carries it off with exceptional intelligence and energy. The triumph of his performance is that it conveys Michael's youthful sensitivity without ever losing an edge of animal menace. To tap the right mixture of emotions, Pacino says...
...moments, it suggests that a general disgust with the moral latitude of thirties Germany drove the middle classes into Hitler's protective arms. Elsewhere, it would appear that the vicarious thrills provided by the cabaret entertainments were identical to the satisfaction some Germans took in the brutal performances of the Nazis. And there is also the intimation that the cabaret was merely the soporific decoy that permitted the Third Reich to rise unnoticed. On these matters, Fosse's editing serves only to confuse issues without ever bothering to define them...
Running them, Geneen lets junior executives put searching questions to their bosses, and he can be argued out of a position by a rare manager who possesses more facts than he does. But Geneen is also impatient, demanding quick figure-filled answers to his questions, and occasionally brutal, verbally flaying or simply ignoring executives who pose questions that he considers irrelevant. Working for Geneen is a tension-filled experience; ITT managers tend to be garrulous, because of the necessity of constantly justifying themselves. They find his constant demands challenging, if unnerving. They also are paid top dollar; five ITT executives...
Ophuls, clearly, does not agree. Neither will the exhausted audience when the film is through, especially as regards the wholesale persecution of Jews by the Vichy government, and the brutal reprisals against "collaborators" and private enemies after the liberation. It is hard to watch the film, though, without wondering how one would have behaved in such fearful circumstances. Like a novelist, Ophuls so persistently catches human particulars that a viewer identifies with the trimmers and villains as well as with the few heroes who appear...
...have few illusions of farm life. It's a good life, but I think it has much of the drudgery of industrial existence without some of the compensations. It's a brutal life. I lived on a farm, but am really not myself a rural creature. I really love New York City...at any rate I'm not sure that rural life or a big commune is an answer...The earth and agriculture are an index of something we need and are rapidly losing, the human animal is geared to interlock with all kinds of raw natural environments. The coming...