Word: conti
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Peter De Vries' 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben from page to screen; he has made a film for, and about, the over-the-hill gang. The central character of Reuben, Reuben is a poet, someone for whom words and even the occasional idea matter. For Gowan Evans McGland (Tom Conti), the English language is a weapon to be used against fools, an aphrodisiac with which to ply faculty wives, and a solace whenever thoughts of suicide dance in his head. Still, words give Gowan problems. His rampant eloquence can prove an embarrassment, as when one avid matron removes her brassiere...
...wily beasts. Through the sweltering days and ominous nights, three British prisoners run variations on the national character. Hicksley-Ellis (Jack Thompson) conducts his impotent belligerence by the book; ragged, resilient Jack Celliers (David Bowie) has the clear eyes and defiant smirk of a Kipling hero; Lawrence (Tom Conti), the camp translator, is an Oxbridgian humanist seeking a tunnel into the Oriental mind. Men are strong; men are shot; men fight on for their peculiar codes of honor. This is an art-house Bridge on the River Kwai, with neither bridge nor river, only a fatal, futile game that each...
...Jumping on the political bandwagon" was a charged leveled not only at Conti and Heckler but at rally speakers and at 21 Republican congressmen who signed a letter supporting financial...
...movies it must be played either with the film equivalent of Berger's fastidious prose-Ordinary People in apocalyptic dead pan-or with the cauterizing fury of a Bunuel satire. A ham-fisted director like John G. Avildsen (Rocky) need not have applied. Nor were Bill Conti's services required: his score sounds like a Spike Jones symphony of klaxons, sassy trombones, Bronx-cheer kazoos and the Hallelujah Chorus. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd maneuver through this minefield on literal flat feet, turning the Blues Brothers into the Two Stooges. Go back to Saturday Night Live, guys...
...originally played on the stage by Tom Conti, an actor of great vulnerability-not a victim, surely, but a less abrasive individual than the film's Richard Dreyfuss, and someone who could more readily be imagined preferring death to a life of immobility and dependence. Dreyfuss, by contrast, seems to bustle while flat on his back, and it is almost impossible to believe that in the end he would not opt for life, however constricted it might...