Word: feral
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...hero, called Ivan, is stylishly played by Jimmy Cliff, a Jamaican musician who has an insinuating, almost feral appeal. Poor and aimless, Ivan wanders about Jamaica, hoping vaguely to be a singer. It is an ambition he fulfills the way he finds a girl friend, the way he starts pushing, and the way, finally, he gets killed: by falling into it. The movie even attempts a kind of Brechtian device: Ivan attends a film, one of those baroque Italian westerns, and dotes on the hero, knowing that he is immune to all real danger until the last reel. When Ivan...
...like Willy Loman, he is virtually humorless, unable to season his despair or get a proper perspective on himself. Because he is an extravert, Keach is weakest in the soliloquies, good in all the social scenes, the guying of Polonius, and brilliant in the duel with Laertes, which for feral second-to-second menace has never been better staged...
...difficulty, may I suggest it would be much more of a treat to see empty prisons than empty streets. Prisons have a bad enough effect on real criminals without our adding to the problem with all sorts of unnecessary "crimes." If the Manhattan hooker is, as you recently said, "feral," it is only because the rest of us have made her that way. A nation gets the kind of whores it deserves...
Edward Albee almost seems to have lived through two careers, one very exciting, the other increasingly depressing. From The Zoo Story through The American Dream to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he displayed great gusto, waspish humor and feral power. In the succeeding nine years, he has foundered in murky metaphysics (Tiny Alice), dabbled in adaptations (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe) and gone down experimental blind alleys (Box-Mao-Box). Instead of lunging for the jugular, as he once did, Albee has cultivated a Jamesian languor in his prose, a fastidious dandyism of manner, a dusty, librarefied...
...subside, the project, like Henry's old wallet, is bare. A New Leaf may be the first film in which Matthau is miscast. He retains his unique webfooted shuffle, and still sends home his jokes special delivery. But his astringent lines ("That woman is not primitive, she is feral") belong on the palate of a George Sanders or a Clifton Webb, not in a sardonic side-of-the-mouth piece. Moreover, May's improvisatory direction overindulges a slew of minor players who could be sued for nonsupport...