Word: epical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...curious year for literature, as well as economics, was 1929, when four works of immutable quality failed to make Miss Hackett's Big Board: two masterworks of William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and Sartoris; Thomas Wolfe's great epic of narcissism, family piety and nostalgia, Look Homeward, Angel; and Ernest Hemingway's pseudo-tough romance A Farewell to Arms ("You won't do our things with another girl?" whispered the dying nurse...
...Dorado by Howard Hawks. As Hawks reaches full maturity, his films increasingly synthesize all the elements of his previous work. El Dorado begins as epic tragedy, yet drifts unerringly into an intense and personal comedy where physical infirmity must be overcome in order to justify friendship and retain an all-important self-respect. The shift in El Dorado's tone is ironically matched by Hawks' stylization: the potential tragedy is played almost entirely in bright daylight, and as the mood of the film lightens, El Dorado moves into a rich and sombre darkness, pointing up the seriousness of Hawks' vision...
...last we have Tammy Tell Me True on the mainstage. George Hamlin has transformed Romeo and Juliet into a sugary epic. Teenagers will adore it, parents will approve: it's baby...
...both conception and execution, Bonnie and Clyde is a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend. An early example of this was Birth of a Nation, which still stands alone; it gave American cinema an epic sense of the nation's history. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was another watershed film, with its stunning use of deep-focus photography and its merciless character analysis of that special U.S. phenomenon, the self-made mogul. John Ford's Stagecoach brought the western up from the dwarfed adolescence of cowboy-and-Injun adventures to the maturity...
Lest we forget, these men are peculiarly American monsters. Mayer, through dialog, and director Thomas Babe through blocking, try two things simultaneously: to recreate the detail and language of the period, and to define a kind of American epic...