Word: eastwoods
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BRONCO BILLY Directed by Clint Eastwood; Screenplay by Dennis Hackin CARNY Directed by Robert Kaylor; Screenplay by Thomas Baum...
...what it could have been. Maybe Langella is too good an actor to be frittered away on the screen. I don't mean that as an insult to films, but where else can an actor with no technical resources--a Jack Nicholson (good as he is), a Clint Eastwood, a Burt Reynolds--come off so well? Langella has broad features that express grand emotions, a voice as resonant and mellifluous as any in the American theater, and consummate physical control. In one scene in the stage Dracula, he brought off a piece of vocal and physical ballet: dodging and twisting...
...flesh-eating zombies? Monster movies reduce every conflict to black vs. white, good vs. evil--that's the point. But they're fantasies--they invoke the supernatural; they don't pretend that that's how it is in real life, the way John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movies do. You can't rehabilitate the alien or the zombies in Dawn-- you've got to blow them away. You don't have to blow away Vietnamese and have your audiences cheering it--unless, as in The Deer Hunter, you depict them as bloodthirsty aliens, which is a lie. (If anything...
Along the way Tuggle takes a risk by surrounding Morris (Eastwood) with some of the most sentimentalized movie prisoners imaginable. There is an old-tuner called Doc (Roberts Blossom), who raises chrysanthemums and paints portraits, not to mention a literary librarian (Paul Benjamin) and a cuddly Italian (Frank Ronzio) with a pet mouse. Next to these lovable guys, an average Boy Scout troop would seem like a bunch of Bowery bums. The warden (Patrick McGoohan), of course, is a sadistic horror. He speaks in malevolent epigrams ("Some are never destined to leave Alcatraz - alive") and carries on what appears...
Alcatraz's cool, cinematic grace meshes ideally with the strengths of its star. Not a man to sell himself to the audience, Eastwood relies on a small as sortment of steely glances and sardonic smiles. Thanks to his ever craggier face, the gestures pay off better than usual, and so do the occasional throwaway laugh lines. At a time when Hollywood entertainments are more overblown than ever, Eastwood proves that less really can be more...