Word: dickensians
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This is not too hard to explain, for on a certain level John Fusco's script is shrewdly calculated. The lads are employed as enforcers by an Englishman (Terence Stamp) who is almost Dickensian in the sentimental kindness he lavishes on lost boys. When he is gunned down in a range war, his wards get to play rebels with a cause, rubbing out authority figures hostile toward high- spirited youth...
Depending on whom you ask, the Rev. Herman Fountain's Bethel Home for Children is either successful therapy for troubled youths or a Dickensian nightmare. Last week a bizarre standoff between Fountain and state officials climaxed when police raided his Lucedale, Miss., Baptist school and church, rounding up 72 children between the ages of ten and 17. Earlier, a state judge had ruled that the children had been subjected to "physical abuse, medical neglect and detention amounting to imprisonment," and ordered that the state department of public welfare take them into emergency custody...
Deep in the bowels of the building, the employees toil in cramped, poorly ventilated rooms, working up to 70 hours a week without overtime. A Dickensian tale about a 19th century sweatshop? Hardly. The scene takes place in the mail "folding room" of the U.S. House of Representatives, where workers have long complained about "prison-like" conditions of employment...
This tumult of passion, literature and coincidence belongs in the Dickensian tradition, and so does Ackroyd. The protagonist of his crowded and exuberant novel is another cursed poet, Charles Wychwood. One afternoon he comes across an old painting showing the marvellous boy as a middle-aged man. Curious, he begins to pore over some obscure manuscripts. They suggest that Chatterton faked his early death, then continued to write more verse under more assumed names, among them William Blake and Thomas Gray. "The greatest plagiarist in history?" inquires a colleague. "No!" Wychwood argues. "He was the greatest poet in history...
...because that system has in his view strayed from the ideals of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state and Gorbachev's idol. And though he argues frequently for a new relationship with the U.S., he seems to have an odd conception of America as a Dickensian hell ruled by the military-industrial complex...