Word: cypher
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...winner of the serious Harvard oration competition. Ullman is revising his speech, which the Class Day committee members described as "poignant." But he says that the selection makes the quality of his humor a little suspect. He claims that his topic, the story of Morton Zyzford, a real cypher who can't come to terms with Harvard, has a serious message about the importance of success. The overall tone will stay light, he says, adding "It is difficult for me to speak seriously about success. Besides I don't think this is the year to beat people over the heads...
...same day, two Roman Catholic Franciscan missionaries mysteriously disappeared: Fathers Michael Jerome Cypher, 35, of Medford, Wisc., a parish priest who had been in Honduras only eight months, and Ivan Betancourt, 35, of Colombia. Now a special investigating commission set up as a result of church pressure has reported that they too were victims of the ranchers' rampage. The commission has charged José Manuel Zelaya (a wealthy landowner), the provincial army commander and two accomplices with murdering the priests...
...investigators' account is grisly indeed. Cypher had been walking into Juticalpa with a man who needed medical treatment. Soldiers arrested and jailed the priest, then took him to Zelaya's ranch. Betancourt was arrested while driving into town and also taken to the ranch. Both priests were interrogated, beaten and shot to death, and their mutilated bodies were thrown down a 120-ft. well in front of Zelaya's hacienda. Seven other victims were found in the well-five who were presumed to be peasant activists, plus two innocent women visitors who had been riding...
...Brad (Jon Cypher) tracks Betty to her motel room and concludes that she is either having an affair or a breakdown. Unequipped to deal with either possibility, he has one stopgap measure: he wants to join up with a clan of swingers and swappers. Betty, usually a glutton for punishment, draws the line. The last scene shows her taking one of the two family cars and heading for an uncertain dawn. That she picks the station wagon with the fake wood paneling on the side to drive off in does not bode well for the future...
...imaginable forces of evil (periodically Jon Voight in his first screen appearance Voight also starred in Williams' second feature. The Revolutionary, again a presumably autobiographical account of alienation, anxiety and revolt. At once a more ambitious film, The Revolutionary seems also less sure of itself: its hero is a cypher (known only by the name of A) and his exploits are set in a purposely vague place and time, allowing Williams' champions to argue that by excising specific political issues the film permits one to concentrate on the psychic events--an argument which cuts both ways, since A's consequent...