Word: fittings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Many critics have tried to prove this proposition (the most famous of these is Robert Warshaw's essay "The Western" included in Dan Talbot's Film: An Anthology). Their reliance either on not calling a film a western merely because it does not fit a presupposition or on setting up as many as ten distinct types of westerns (the lone man western, the calvary western, the adult neurotic western, etc.) should be evidence in itself of the dubious quality of this theory. However, what concerns me more at this moment is the effect this idea has on filmmakers themselves...
...Cogburn, the old marshal. His characterization is a modification of the familiar Wayne walking through the action unperturbed, but is so subtle and full of things peculiar to Cogburn that one is forced to marvel at the ability of an actor to take and archtype and mold it to fit a particular situation...
When, at the crowd's insistence, Wein brought them back for their encore, there was only one thing they could sing, only one thing that fit, "You made me so very happy--I'm so glad you came into my life...
...Martin have made Laugh-In one of the phenomena of the McLuhan age. How could they miss in the movies? By making The Maltese Bippy, a yawn-in of the team's celebrated videocies and running gags. Though Rowan and Martin are shoehorned into a plot, the fit is loose enough to let the boys play themselves. Rowan is still the smart one, and Martin is correctly addressed as a dingaling, a dumdum and a dodo...
...appears as an extremist of one sort or another. Spender shows a certain fondness for "girls with hair like seaweed." He is as fascinated as a traveler from another planet by the rebel-rhetorical style, which he traces back to the beatniks: "It had the inspiration of some sustained fit of oaths from the mouth of a drunken Welshman." He even admires the way student-rebels combine "a passion for solitude with a love of being televised...