Word: conned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...They grow out of a lot movies and eventually turn them all into mere incidents in the larger and more absorbing drama of the star career. Consider Eastwood's moralistic killer, whose cold eyes are set off by his incongruously boyish voice and smile, or Reynolds' good-ole-boy con man, shooting from the lip as fast as Eastwood shoots from the hip. The comparison is not with their contemporary peers but with the major figures of the great age of screen heroism, to Coop and Gable, Bogie and Duke, those exemplars of the democratic notion that the seemingly ordinary...
...setting is a tavern near Boston. The time is 1828. The hero is an O'Neill staple, the man of illusions-cum-sorrows, bottle-fed. With the aid of drink, Con Melody (Jason Robards) cultivates a highly colored remembrance of things past-the Gaelic gallant seducing the lovelies of Europe, the fearless cavalry major decorated on a Spanish field of honor by the great Wellington himself. In sorry reality, he is an impoverished tavern keeper too proud to tend bar as his father did in Ireland. Indeed, pride hagrides Con Melody, like the Greek Furies, except that...
...scarlet dragoon's uniform, he preens before a mirror and loftily mouths stanzas from Byron. Playing the highborn gentleman, though fooling no one, Con charges over the countryside on a thoroughbred mare while reducing his daughter to a barroom slavey. He sneers at the Yankees as vulgar traders while owing them money and enjoying none of their trade...
...fiery daughter Sara (Kathryn Walker) has a wealthy young Yankee in tow, and when it comes out that the boy's father wants no truck with the peat-bog Melodys, Con rides swaggeringly forth to avenge such an insult by issuing a dueling challenge. Terribly beaten by the police, Con stumbles home in a state of catatonic silence, all the posturing and pride of him. This time he goes forth only to kill the last emblem of his dream, his blooded mare, his Byronic self...
...confirmed a dream addict as any of the tosspots in The Iceman Cometh, Con Melody is unlike them in having a family around him-a low-born wife Nora (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who unfalteringly loves him, his mettlesome daughter Sara, who is increasingly roused to hate. Yet each inspires in him only a more desolating sense of aloneness. In the costly family game of lies and consequences, Con bears more than a few resemblances to O'Casey's Paycock...