Word: dad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...certainly not a youth picture, and it hardly seems the sort of thing that would induce Mom and Dad to spring for a sitter and a night on the town. Maybe the producers were trying to crash the senior-citizens market, give the old folks a thrill and a little grue some encouragement against the insults of aging. A notion like that conjures up entertaining visions of audiences full...
...filled with chocolate candies and salted peanuts (and perhaps marmalade candies if it's Passover). A late night movie starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy is on the living room television as the student fixes himself a salami and cheese sandwich with a pickle on the side (Mom and Dad have gone to sleep an hour ago). A high school friend stops by to smoke cigarettes and reminisce about old escapades. Vacation finally rolls around, and it's off to home. There are only Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies showing on the tube, Mom has bought American rather than...
...Dad (and the older boys) she appears to be a sex sym: bol, impure and simple as her long, sinuous body-high fashion, but with some meat on her smoothly articulated bones -slithers into closeup, her navel twinkling as invitingly as her sequins. Then, however, a shy smile splits her deadpan. As she speaks a few words of earnest greeting in her curiously flat voice, Pop and the other males see they can afford to relax. Underneath all that finery and a ceramic of makeup there is a rather awkward, imperfectly beautiful girl. She appears no more daunting than...
...characters act only out of the bas est of motives: Dad, for example, gets canned from his p.r. job because of the sudden family disgrace. He then spends much of the film trying to hunt down and kill his own child, as if to win back community respect. Even a score by the usually excellent Bernard Herrman is of little help. Herrman did the music for many of Hitchcock's best films (Vertigo, Psycho). His participation in It's Alive lends it a fleeting and futile air of quality, like a concert virtuoso playing piano in a cathouse...
...experiences of our foremothers, like their plans and frustrations, are brushed under the proverbial rug or efficiently vacuumed away and dumped in the garbage. What does it matter that your lover's eccentric old grandmother was 1952's Waitress of the Year in Kalamazoo, or that Mom never told Dad that her reason for turning down that teaching fellowship at Berkeley was fear of threatening his "male ego." After all, these are the days of affirmative action...