Word: devil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Waiting to seduce and subvert them are an ambassador, who runs black masses which degenerate into orgies; his 70-year-old mother, who is not above a little devil worship and perversion herself; his butler, who strangles a secretary in the Capitol while clad only in a human skin--not his own; and a vice president, who plans his campaign around Tarot cards...
...ALFRED DREYFUS, a Jewish officer in the French army, was convicted of treason by a military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Dreyfus never ceased to protest his innocence. The evidence against him was weak from the start and was later shown to have been fabricated. But Dreyfus was a victim of virulent anti-Semitism. His name was not cleared until 1906, after a bitter and divisive struggle between Dreyfus's accusers and the republicans, socialists and anticlericalists who, led by French novelist Emile Zola, defended his innocence...
Nearby, a spectator who was not yelling and cheering enough was being removed from his seat and replaced by a noisier, more cheerful fellow. "Poor devil," thought the fan to himself. "Struck down by the designated fan rule. What a shame...
...dialogue contains direct tributes to such classics as John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and John Ford's The Searchers. But the most obvious homage is to Huston's Beat the Devil, a bit of straight-faced parody made more or less off the cuff. The picture has strong overtones of a director's not only assaulting the audience but deflating himself in the process. Indeed, Warren Gates seems to have modeled his excellent characterization of Bennie on Peckinpah himself, complete with foggy aspect, enveloping sunglasses and calculatedly gross behavior...
...Beat the Devil was good-humored and breezy, however, and Alfredo Garcia is full of fury and bile. It is a troubling, idiosyncratic and finally unsuccessful film-troubling not for the feelings of horror it intermittently tries to conjure up but for the impression it gives of being a dead end. It is like a private bit of self-mockery, a sort of ritual of closet masochism that invites, even challenges, everyone to think the worst...