Word: everymanic
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While this is hardly a picture of the typical American family, it does represent a pressing moral problem that has been largely obscured by the more dramatic issues of war, sex and civil rights. The problem is the erosion of Everyman's conscience about how he conducts his everyday life in less spectacular areas. A nation's ethical climate is made up of small, half-automatic decisions taken by ordinary people in response to life's daily bumps and urgings. That climate in the U.S. today seems far from salubrious...
Britko's agony of conscience becomes everyman's agony as the film, initially a simple piece of village comedy, shifts into social criticism and ultimately into tragedy. As Kadar once said, the story of Mrs. Lautmann "could be transplanted to a Negro woman in Alabama, or a woman awaiting deportation to Siberia in Stalinist Russia, but why should we go outside our own country?" Kadar's genius, however, consists in focusing upon Britko, the best of the typical villagers. When Britko finally breaks down, the social order of the village has reached its nadir...
...several times to underscore the emotional impact of a scene. The film's conceptual flaw is in the character of the carpenter, a prefabrication rather obviously nailed onto a thesis. Socially and psychologically in limbo, freely indulging his impulses, François may be intended as a natural Everyman but can also seem a bit of a nit, a boy rover in a working-class wonderland. Tested against cold reality, his story rings false; yet Varda gives it the aura of just-discovered truth, of a vision entirely personal and poetic...
...Johnson shifted targets and be gan sketching the kaleidoscopic vitality of the city's street life. Employing a splattery "action painting" technique, he captured the darkly contoured busts of the derelicts who flopped out on the Bowery. He dignified Everyman, even in despair. Said he: "I wanted to prove that man is more than a man - to put him on a pedestal. The human and the monumental are contradictory, but I wanted to put them together...
...subtle genius of Chaplin's tramp or of Keaton's mote in the eye of an incomprehensible universe lay beyond the range of Laurel and Hardy. But they were lovable caricatures of the dolt in Everyman, a bow and fiddle striking delightfully dissonant chords in a mad world. Witless innocence was their hallmark. It purifies even a 20's sequence in which they are pursued, clad in underdrawers, by a pair of gorgon wives toting a shotgun to avenge some fancied infidelity-as they round the corner of an apartment house, a shotgun blast brings dozens...