Word: devoid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Loesser was a tough-minded and competitive businessman who managed his own publishing, producing, management and booking companies. But he was devoid of pretense and the professional jealousy that afflicted so many others in the business. It was Loesser who refused Author-Director George Abbott's offer to write Pajama Game, instead pressured Abbott into giving two young writers named Jerry Ross and Richard Adler a chance. They made the most of it. Pajama Game (1954) was a smash. If Frank Loesser believed in his friends and proteges, he also believed in himself. And who could blame...
Whatever conclusions political leaders and the public ultimately reach, however long or short the national memory, Kennedy may suffer in another, more basic way. He has not been a man devoid of self-doubt for some time. Now this burden could grow heavier, as he compares the Kennedy standard as it was passed to him and its present condition. Can he be sure of his own judgment and grit? He himself acknowledged the dilemma last week when he quoted from J.F.K.: "The stories of past courage cannot supply courage itself. For this, each man must look into his own soul...
...Ross from Yellow country--my family has property so I don't see why you are mishandling me," she says when she falls into the hands of an outlaw band. (Like every other utterance she makes this emerges as what can only be described as cultivated Indian--speech entirely devoid of conjunctions and intonation.) She is cold and resistant to Campbell's obvious sexual interest in her until Campbell is safely dead, at which point she strokes his hair, thus demonstrating her felling for him which she probably felt for some time but didn't deem proper to acknowledge. When...
...Wild Bunch is the story of a group of men whose only communal experience is killing. They whose only communal experience is killing. They are always shown alone (hence the preponderance of close-ups), divorced not only from their surroundings but from each other. Devoid of any real personal identity, they live only for the moments when they are "in action," presumably revelling in the beauty of spurting blood...
...personal. But the film's simultaneous fragility and dynamism work only because Ford's method so perfectly integrates these sources of tension. The way he stylizes his characters through their sentiments. That Ford manages to create a society from action so charged with individual character, so devoid of fixed habit, and that he manages t make a film whose continual growth overcomes the wildly conflicting shots and emotions of which it is built, reveals his creative genius at the peak of its powers. MIKE PROKOSCH