Word: firebug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...riding home on the monorail, he meets a girl (Julie Christie) who looks like his wife but has something more exciting on her mind. "Have you ever read the books you burn?" she asks him slyly. He hasn't, but the idea really grabs him. Overnight, the firebug is transformed into a bookworm. Horrified, the hero's wife betrays him to the thought police; but before they can close in, he runs off to join a literary maquis composed of men and women who spend their lives strolling through a birch forest and memorizing books against...
...humorless. Based on a sober historical novel by Jack Schaefer (Shane), the movie attempts to spark laughs by logging the misadventures of Company Q, a detachment of Yankee misfits led by inept Colonel Melvyn Douglas and his wry-smiling lieutenant, Glenn Ford. The boobs under their command include a firebug, a flagpole sitter, a kleptomaniac, a skittish soldier afflicted with an untimely burp, and assorted psychopaths...
Pyro glosses over its terror with a sort of Hitchcock-and-bull story photographed in Spain in flamenco hues and laved in bucketfuls of blue butane gas. The film casts Barry Sullivan as a philanderer who becomes a firebug when cast-off Playmate Martha Hyer sends his house up in flame. His wife and daughter dead, Barry survives, a hideously deformed monster with a "carbonized" brain. Crazed, hunted, vowing fiery vengeance, he hides behind a mask that inexplicably looks just like his old self. To keep the movie's audience from straying out for a smoke, there are some...
...other stories, notably The Other John Peel and The Firebug, are well told but have the characteristic defect in that Sillitoe's automata of the sub-world are moved to explain themselves in terms of those heavily bearded bores Marx and Freud. An unctuous homiletic tone slops over into the hard-case dialogue as Sillitoe labors to make clear that the allright blokes are pro-Corn and the real rozzers are Tory types...