Word: bum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Donald Pleasence, as the monumentally disgusting bum Jenkins ("That's my assumed name"), is the best reason for seeing the movie. Alan Bates and Robert Shaw, as the mysterious brothers who own the room, are two other excellent reasons...
...with themselves and blunted by past obliviousness, that they expect little sympathy and give none. Each character cherishes a scheme which will somehow give birth to his personality: one brother has a minute plan for decorating the room, the other wants to build a shed out back, and the bum is always about to go down to Sidcup to get the papers that prove who he is. The bum feels called upon to assert his sanity by bursting into prideful indignation at vaguely appropriate moments. His finicky concern about his shoes, especially, reminds one of the bums in Waiting...
...dirty words and **** for scenes of sex. What Selby scrupulously elides are all the pleasant moments of life. What's left, he tells in a style that will also inevitably be hailed as "tape-recorder realism"-because it mumbles like the nonstop mouthings of a drink-sodden bum or screams like a borderline psychotic...
Shout from the floor: Answer the question, George, you bum...
Passing the Hat. Nonetheless, not all critics think the change is for the good. "Which is preferable," asks a German travel agent, "the grotesque, quasi-colonialist old-style tourists, or the traveling beatniks, who bum their way from city to city, sing folk songs and pass the hat in real and phony artists' dives, and accept any job that will subsidize their tours?" Any Parisian who caught the act along the Rue Scribe this summer would be hard put to make the choice. Daily, the area around American Express headquarters swarmed with disheveled U.S. youths who were so desperate...