Word: cunninghams
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Hard Contract's protagonist is a toothy, vicious gunman-for-hire named Cunningham (James Coburn). In the employ of an anonymous corporation whose business is murder, Cunningham jets off for Europe with a "hard contract" to eliminate three top men who were themselves organization assassins. He manages well enough until he meets an attractive divorcee called Sheila (Lee Remick). Before anyone can say Philosophy in the Bedroom, Cunningham and Sheila are under the same bedspread, where they spend most of their time discussing doom, guilt, predestination, war, violence, murder and the population explosion...
...this makes it difficult for Cunningham to rub out his last man (Sterling Hayden), who lives on a farm and has a disconcerting habit of holding seminars on ethics in his wheat field. Audiences will be kept in stupefying suspense wondering whether Coburn will ever get around to killing Hayden, but by the time just about everybody rides into the sunset on a gypsy wedding wagon, who could care...
...Exhibitionist. Director Elliott, 44, who took over when Charles Cunningham moved on to the Art Institute of Chicago three years ago, is proud of the basic collection for which the museum is famed-a small but distinguished selection of baroque paintings, classical bronzes, Meissen porcelain, 17th and 18th century furniture, antique firearms. But even before the shutdown, he set energetically to work to bring the Atheneum more up to date in art history. Conspicuously displayed in the new galleries and elsewhere were some of his acquisitions: Tony Smith's Amaryllis, Cezanne's Portrait of a Child, an important...
Even before the museum closed for its renovation, Elliott had displayed a showman's flair for lively, avant-garde exhibitions. In the museum's auditorium, courageous Hartford patrons have been exposed to the underground films of Bruce Conner, the dances of Merce Cunningham, the electronic music of Karl-heinz Stockhausen. But Elliott does not think of himself as primarily an exhibitionist. "I think there are too many special exhibitions going on," says Elliott with a trace of exasperation. "You exhaust your public with temporary shows and they never get upstairs to see your permanent collections...
Meanwhile, his 18-year marriage to Dancer Carolyn Brown of the Merce Cunningham company seems to be enough proof of his conviction that "art is the fruit of human relationship." And vice versa. To Brown, what counts about art is that it changes people's lives. "Art observes the condition of the world and asks how we can make things relate better," he says. "What I value most is the way people relate to each other. Life today is about transition, not monuments. I don't want to make monuments. I want to be here...