Word: descends
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...BOOK OF NUMBERS has a raucous, picaresque, raunchy kind of charm, at least initially. Two black con men (Raymond St. Jacques and Philip Thomas) descend on an Arkansas town called El Dorado during the early '30s to start a numbers bank. Thomas has a rather meandering love affair with a "high yellow" woman (Freda Payne), leaving him little time to help St. Jacques fight off racist law officers and greedy white gangsters. St. Jacques, who also directed, works in some nice period feeling and a couple of quick, glancing social asides about the daily indignities of being black. After...
...time has lived so fully and with such daemonic intensity? There are no candidates. "Painting," he once observed, "is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants." There is no way to guess on whom, if anyone, Picasso's now homeless dybbuk may next descend...
...into that flashback. The first scene, a shelf of books moves slowly back into an entire library. A patron seeks a certain book. There is a story behind the book. Our story. The head librarian becomes wistful, his voice wavy and echoed. We have a movie. From there, we descend once more, from a trial room, into a set of vignettes, each brought on by slow close-up of a portable tape recorder, as the dreamer's voice is raised...
...last, justice for John Burgoyne! To descend through history tagged as a fool and tarred with the nickname "Gentleman Johnny" is hard duty for a commander whose ineptitude certainly was no worse than what is customarily thought acceptable, even praiseworthy, in general officers. Burgoyne bears the responsibility for England's defeat at Saratoga during the American Revolution. He planned and executed the campaign of 1777, but this crisis in the struggle between England and her American colonies came much nearer to turning in a different direction than is imagined in schoolboy history...
...large, the poorer and more primitive the country, the worse the thievery. Says Clemency Coggins, an authority on pre-Columbian art and archaeology: "Not since the 16th century has Latin America been so ruthlessly plundered." Teams descend (sometimes literally, from helicopters) on any of the hundreds of Mayan ceremonial sites that lie scattered throughout Mexico and Guatemala...