Word: corker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...should. When the great director King Vidor made The Champ in 1931, he created a four-handkerchief corker; a fine cast (Wallace Beery, the young Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich) and Vidor's emotional restraint prevented a sugary story from caramelizing. This remake, directed by Franco Zeffirelli (Romeo and Juliet), is another matter entirely. By miscasting all three major roles, adding 35 minutes to the original film's running time and reaching for cheap effects, the director has gilded a lily and then shredded...
Slade stops at Scottie's discovery of his emotional insulation, never digging any deeper into the roots of his fears--you know, the primal stuff. Tribute winds up pat and tidy, without plunging us into the existential abyss that can make this sort of thing a real corker. The tragedy of the American sit-com writer has turned out awfully shallow. This bathos gives Jack Lemmon his star turn: fast-food epiphany, downstage center. Neither he nor Slade really needed this--although it must be fun to break down onstage. Tribute slobbers when it ought only to quiver; the mask...
Dreaming up contingency plans is hardly a new exercise for U.S. military officers on dull afternoons, but one stupefying day in 1919 must have been a corker. Searching for topics for his history seminars at the University of Missouri at Kansas City recently, Professor Lawrence H. Larsen discovered a plan drafted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in case it felt obliged to invade, of all places, Canada...
SATURDAY: The Andromeda Strain. 1971. Robert Wise, who directed one of the best science fiction flicks ever, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," teamed with pop fiction writer Michael Crichton to produce this thriller about a biological menace to the world's population. A corker of an ending. CH. 4. 9 p.m. Color...