Word: egomaniacs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Surprisingly for a film biography of a man who is still alive (the real Knievel performed in Madison Square Garden a month ago), the hero is portrayed as an egomaniac, a compulsive worrier and a shameless searcher after publicity. Marvin Chomsky's direction is pedestrian, but the script (by Alan Caillou, John Milius and Pat Williams) has some nice moments of quirky comedy, as when a fissure opens in the earth and a rather large automobile disappears without a trace. The film is good-naturedly skeptical and occasionally satiric about Knievel's exploits-in marked and welcome relief...
...Joseph Stalin blossomed across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union and its satellites. But after his death in 1953, the old dictator's successors ruthlessly turned against him. In a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 denounced Stalin as an egomaniac who employed mass terror and torture. Stalin was then efficiently erased from public view, and the exterior vestiges of his rule-statues, pictures, street signs -came tumbling down. Only in his native Georgia did his statues and pictures remain in place. In 1961, as a final act of destalinization, his body...