Word: epical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such were the odds The Untouchables stacked against itself before its June 3 opening. Now, after drawing enthusiastic reviews and a robust $15.9 million in its first week, Paramount's gangster epic is starting to look like Beverly Hills Cop II, Too. The Eddie Murphy action comedy has earned a phenomenal $89 million in its first three weeks. But The Untouchables may challenge Murphy with durability, what the industry calls "legs." A.D. Murphy, Variety's guru of grosses, credits The Untouchables with a "most auspicious beginning. It could run all summer." Privately, industry honchos now believe by year...
...might therefore join De Palma and Screenwriter David Mamet in a prayer that their epic work -- a masterpiece of idiomatic American moviemaking as well as a plangent commentary on its traditions -- will be spared from the literalists, complaining both that the gore is too real and that the characters are not real enough. Protect them as well from the wrath of the traditionalists, who resist the intrusion of originality on their passion for the endless restatement of stale generic conventions. Deliver them instead to the audience that will be galvanized, as the filmmakers were, by the chance to reimagine...
...wide in his search for material to transform into his own dramas. He rivaled Shakespeare, the literary grave-robber supreme, in his audacious choice of sources. Twenties cinema, 18th century musicals, Renaissance history, Jack London stories; in Brecht's hands they all became the stuff of his proletarian "epic" theater...
...Brecht's track record, putting spin on a familiar story was one of the surer ways of accomplishing this. Even when Brecht was ripping off no one in particular, he felt the need to cloak his work with the patina of plagiarism. According to Brecht's doctrine of the epic play, setting works in an unfamiliar and unsympathetic context allows the audience to absorb the message of the works rather than getting absorbed in the character and stories. If Andrei Serban's seminew production of Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan shows anything, it's that a playwright...
Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies Carol O. Herron, who came to Harvard this year to augment the department's literature offerings, this spring taught a course on Afro-American poetry. Herron, who previously studied Latin American epic fiction on a Fulbright Award in Mexico, is an expert on Milton and the epic. "My work involves showing the way in which the Afro-American epic has developed in America with African, American and European sources," she says...