Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Melville's career was incredibly uneven. The creator of Moby Dick was also the author of White-Jacket, Typee, Omoo, and Pierre; or the Ambiguities, and the poet of Battle-Pieces was also the poet of Clarel, an amazingly inept pseudo-epic on Biblical themes. Warren's edition of Melville is a priceless edition to Melville scholarship, for the continuity it brings to the author's work, the way it integrates his fiction and verse in a coherent outline. At Warren's hands, the ambiguous Melville begins to make sense...
...toward the castle. The climactic battle scene in a new film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth was under way. As black smoke billowed into the sky, the extras threw down their camouflage and charged the spiky fortifications with a battering ram and scaling ladders. Exciting stuff? "These epic scenes bore me to death," said Director Roman Polanski. "The real stuff is in the studio, where you can get into your characters...
...parade status, Harris turned out a lamentable series of songs and albums a la Tom Jones only to find his voice failing under the strain. For those repulsed by Harris' posturing as King Arthur in Camelot, Cromwell will hold only one surprise: in between the musical and the historical epic, Harris has lost his ability to speak. For a second-string Richard Burton, such and impairment is obviously of a high order, especially since Harris' own brand of acting is so mannered and monochromatic. He stalks through this film scowling a large part of the time (perhaps he supposes Puritans...
...country estate once at the beginning and once toward the end of the film. In between, he is in terms of motivation but a robot; the fluid shifts in Charles' feelings, however, receive more continuous and more affecting development all through the film than one would expect in an epic called Cromwell...
Little Big Man. Arthur Penn's latest film may well be his best. Scripted by Galder Willingham from Thomas Berger's novel, it spans the 121-year life of Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) to arrive at a truly epic vision of what the American experience is all about. As in Bonnie and Clyde and Alice's Restaurant, Penn's hero searches painfully for a way of life that will bring order and meaning to human existence. Crabb tries everything; he becomes an Indian, a white man, a con man, a drunk, a husband, a gun man, a resident...