Word: bucked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Buck-Passing. The trouble began at dawn on Monday when 200 prisoners seized five guards and held them hostage behind a barricade of mattresses, bedsprings and chairs until their grievances were heard. After city and prison officials heard the complaints-overcrowding, filthy cells, guard brutality -the hostages were released unharmed. But the next day 800 other dissidents continued the disruptions. With growing fury, the rebels hurled tin cups, plates, pipes and anything else they could wrench from their cell walls. After seizing four of the building's twelve floors, they smashed 3-in.-thick glass windows and tossed chairs...
...movement did not originate solely with Superman. Buck Rogers, Frankenstein, or even H. G. Wells. A great wealth of horrifying supernatural material has always filled the world's myths. Sigmund Freud, because he raised the unconscious to the conscious level, may well be the seminal figure. Of course any Science Fiction worth its metaphysical salt extends outward to the blackest realms of the universe where our planet is lost among other planets, and our galaxy among other galaxies. But Science Fiction is also a voyage inward to the realm of the unconscious where identities merge into the one-ness...
Through all of this lush verbal growth, doubt comes creeping toward the reader. What Pifer is up to is no mere suspense story. Somewhat in the manner of Richard Condon, he intends a demolishing burlesque of the big-buck sector of U.S. society. Some of his touches are good. He knows, for instance, the precise frequencies at which high-salaried underlings twitch in the presence of heavy money. He can show two flacks of opposed allegiance snicking at each other with unsheathed falsehoods, and trace the exact grimace of the loser...
...conquer Hollywood and devastate mankind. After Myron (Rex Reed) opens the proceedings by having himself castrated, Raquel Welch takes over as Myra. With Myron tagging along as her altered ego, she then lights out for Hollywood to claim half of an acting school owned by Myron's uncle, Buck Loner (John Huston). Once she implants herself as a teacher there, she decides to initiate her program of conquest of the male by sexually humiliating a Cro-Magnon pupil named Rusty Godowsky (Roger Herren). That task done, in a scene so tasteless that it represents some sort of nadir...
Comedy, of all things, is the film's weakest component. As an adapter, Buck Henry has supplied a terse, sufficient script; it is as a comic actor that he is wanting. In the part of Colonel Korn, he violates the first rule of humor: if what you're doing is funny, you don't have to be funny doing it. Playing outpatients of Dr. Strangelove, he and his Tweedledummy Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam) italicize every punch line. Even their faces are overstatements. As General Dreedle, Orson Welles sweeps past like Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, all plastic and gas. Dreedle...