Word: earling
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...remerge, coagulating into some gigantic snarl of cables and wires. If that happens, I assume, the television commercials that were designed to make those diverse companies distinctive will simply meld together for a while, so that Candice Bergen will discuss the Yellow Pages with James Earl Jones in the voice of Dick Cavett...
...SINCE IN THE HEAT OF THE Night has a good ole cracker had a culture shock like the one Earl Pilcher Jr. (Robert Duvall) receives in A Family Thing. It comes in the form of a deathbed letter from the woman he has always believed was his mother. In it she tells him that though he looks, acts and thinks white, he is half black, the product of a union six decades ago between his father and the family's African-American maid, who died giving birth to him. His adoptive mother's last wish is that he find...
...finding is relatively easy; Ray Murdock (James Earl Jones) is a policeman in Chicago. Making peace is another matter; Ray knows how his mother died, was in fact present on that terrible night. Forgiving the white man who seduced her and the half brother whose breech birth killed her is not in his heart. Ray has hidden his long-denied anger beneath a smoothly affable manner. Earl is hiding his more recent astonishment under stony taciturnity. But big-city circumstances force him to take refuge in Ray's home, where his blind, wise, straight-talking aunt (Irma P. Hall) maneuvers...
...interesting but not wholly plausible twist, despite Earl's "white" identity and Southern roots, it is actually he who shakes off his prejudices most easily. Beneath Earl's expressionless facade, he harbors no real racism and sincerely wants to get to know this brother he has never known. Ray's conversion is the true struggle: though outwardly courteous, he holds on to his resentment and his hatred to the very end. An undercurrent of tension therefore remains up to the day of Earl's departure, when Aunt T. shares a secret with them both that dissolves the final barrier between...
...this intended moment of epiphany somehow falls flat, spoiled by Aunt T.'s inappropriate exclamation "You were as white as an angel!" In general, the women in "A Family Thing"--Aunt T., Mrs. Pilcher, Ray's and Earl's mother--are too saintly to be true, while the men are either churls (like Pilcher, Sr.) or burdened by a huge chip on the shoulder. Like balky horses, they must be forced into decent, sensible behavior by their womenfolk. "A Family Thing" would probably have been more convincing had nobility and selfishness been more evenly divided between the two sexes...