Word: cynicism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...doctrinaire Communism. As the film's central figure, Jan Kačer plays a slogan-spouting, blockheaded factory worker -a model product of the Stalinist old regime. Representing the newer, more relaxed style of Communism are his cheeky blonde mistress (Jana Brejchová) and an impudent young cynic (Josef Abrhám), who refuses to echo Kačer's unquestioning beliefs. A puritanical bore who turns off friends and fellow factory workers, Kačer is beaten in a beer hall by resentful colleagues, ultimately comes to realize that his pompous pronunciamentos can no longer...
...precise, often dazzling. It was shot through with self-pity and brittle melancholy. Her frequent approach was to make herself the fall girl in the battle of the sexes, and her favorite method was the abrupt change of pace. She might gush sentimentally and then suddenly clamp on her cynic's mask...
Howard Cutler had nice moments as Romelio, the moneygrubbing pushy brother. He was properly incestuous with his sister and properly encouraging to her suitors. But Romelio is a cynic. He thinks omnipotent dieties don't exist and the aristocracy is a lot of malarkey. The power that operates in the world is a person with money. So he's up tight: if his money disappears, he does too. Cutler's movements onstage didn't convey that anxiety. They had a student looseness that suggested--Every-thing's OK, baby...
Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie has been widely hailed as some sort of beautiful moral statement from a reformed cynic. Don't believe it. Wilder's cynicism--really his acceptance of the truth--is very much in evidence in The Fortune Cookie; it makes his moralism palatable...
Because The Fortune Cookie is, (unlike just about every Wilder picture in the last fifteen years) modest, it is difficult to regard as a major work. Yet with the slick surface stripped away from Wilder, he turns from a destructive into a constructive cynic. You learn again that evil mercenary people dominate the world, and for the first time that relative goodness need not indicate a suspect I.Q. or similar character defect...