Word: canting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CURT RALSTON was both clever and affecting as "The Statue" of a war hero that cynically comments on the inscription at its feet and the cant of passersby. But sometimes Ralston lets his marionette affectations dominate numbers that would be better played naturally. Paula Rose is the "Timid Frieda" and keeps her reserve amidst the general flamboyance: she is a useful touchstone for calm and excels in romantic numbers such as "I Loved...
Wain is particularly acute on Orwell's impact on his contemporaries. Orwell saw through leftist cant and he saw through Stalin - which tended to make him unpopular with his natural allies...
...that their academic freedom should therefore be taken away, well this seems like pure double-think to me. The charges against the students seem to be essentially that they showed no respect for Professor Herrnstein. Well, they have none: nor, perhaps, should they. The message is simply that YOU CANT LEGISLATE RESPECT, although this university seems willing...
KUBRICK, however, removes the ambivalence of the Burgess viewpoint, and weights all material on Alex's side. The people whom the gang beat up are ugly or ridiculous--they spout cant about the lack of law and order or assume mere postures of fear. Alex still gets to screw two teen-age girls, but here he doesn't first get them drunk or shoot them up with horse. Kubrick makes his representatives of the state not only bland, but sexually randy. Most important for audience emotion-letting: out of all the victims seen, only Alex suffers. Kubrick has, in general...
...later chapters are less autobiography than polemic. The tone swings wildly from bitterness to defiance, from humor to cant, from wisdom to frenzy. The gentlest statement about whites is that "all white people need to be taken out of power, but they all clearly are not evil." The only white leaders to whom any quarter is offered are the dead Kennedy brothers and John Lindsay...