Word: dumbing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...system has forced people to think that they live in Hell because they deserve no better. You are poor because you are dumb and uncreative and your breath smells...
Things to Come. In truth, Tommy is a creation likely to cause a certain perplexity in the mind as well as in the middle ear. Thematically it is a parable about a boy who grows deaf, dumb and blind after watching his father kill his mother's lover. Because of his exceptional sense of touch, however, he becomes a pinball champion. Later, miraculously cured, he becomes a pinball messiah and finally the leader of a quasi-religious state. When he insists that his followers play pinball with their mouths gagged, their eyes blindfolded, their ears plugged with stoppers...
...young, who have been known to feel that parents and the leaders of the state are deaf, dumb and blind to them, Tommy has strong symbolic meaning. Yet its arrival at the Met, via the Fillmore East, several European opera houses and a record sale of $2,000,-000, is less a triumph for music than proof of the maxim that if you say something loud enough and long enough, people will believe it. Tommy is not an opera, of course, but an extended song cycle. It does have its moments: Pinball Wizard, for example, is explosive, driving, topnotch-hard...
...system has forced people to think that they live in Hell because they deserve no better. You are poor because you are dumb and uncreative and your breath smells...
...sense of atmosphere and characterization, and his actors all perform with roistering energy. Fraser whines expertly as a craven Scotsman, and Elliott proves once again that he is one of the most accomplished character actors at work in films today. Robertson gives his role just the right mixture of dumb impudence and shrewd calculation. And then there is Caine, an extraordinarily good performer with an apparent weakness for taking any role that comes along. Despite his mighty skills both as a dramatic actor and comedian (AIfie, The Magus, Gambit), his talent is in danger of being blunted by too many...