Word: context
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Focusing on ethics in the legal context, Bruce says topics of discussion in his course have included whether one should use improperly obtained evidence, as well as the importance of protecting individual rights in controversial cases...
...insists, the Party failed. Certainly Communists did not mobilize masses of workers or save the migrants. In retrospect, some of the Communists now note that they failed to see America through American eyes and were thus unable to weather Stalinism or McCarthyism. But Gornick downplays the social and political context of these failures, although the best sections of the interviews address precisely these issues. She dwells instead on the Party's loss of humanity. Marriages suffered, friendships were severed and psyches were bruised. Communists, she tells us sadly, did bad things to one another...
...enough to demonstrate that Max is a classic recidivist, trapped forever in a cycle of antisocial behavior, but they can't get off so easily. A character as alienated as Max, however realistically drawn, becomes compelling only if he is rooted in a larger psychological or intellectual context...
There is no context to Straight Time; the movie is all matter-of-fact incidents. Max gets out of jail on parole, breaks parole, commits burglaries and awaits certain reincarceration. While one is grateful that the script does not explain Max's self-destructiveness with handwringing, Freudian sermons, Straight Time might at least have explored the existential meaning of his criminal joyrides. The movie chooses instead to rub our noses in the sad predictability of Max's life, as if sheer gloom were its own reward...
...shows us. The payola affair is mentioned briefly in one scene, but Freed's relationship to it is fudged. The movie ends with an ominous subtitle epilogue which informs us that Freed was indicted and died "penniless" shortly thereafter. This is a truth which is distorted by its context. The real Freed was indeed a Messiah of rock and roll, but not for its own sake alone. He had lots to gain. The treatment of Freed points up the main feature of this movie, its defusing of almost all controversial issues at the time with palpable, very nearly relentless innocence...