Word: gangsterisms
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...Laurent likes to look back to the 1920s and 1930s. Last year it was Marlene Dietrich suits and the gangster look; this year, in what was billed as homage to 84-year-old Coco Chanel, he turned out a whole series of lowwaisted, high-collared, frilly-skirted dresses that brought cheers and bravos from the spectators...
...would be nicer to worry about bullets zipping, but everybody has his own little idea about what's melodramatic. Corman's is oddly pedestrian, especially plot-wise. Whenever a bastardly gangster pokes his head on the screen for the first time, an ominous reportorial voice treats you to his date of birth, to a list of his illegal actvities including the number of wives and mistresses he keeps, and to the picturesque means of his invariably violent death. The resumes are satisfying; Corman kills any curiosity about a man's fate that may have started growing malignantly inside...
...even if he were the only available brunette in Hollywood. He looks like a fine man who tumbled into the murder business by accident; he isn't crass enough for silk scarves and tophats to look appropriately ridiculous on him. Ralph Meeker, his Irish contender, is more like a gangster. His grubby soul shines right through his lovely suit. George Segal, another Irishman, has Robards handicap-elemental elegance. On top of that, he bears such an incredible resemblance to Robards that when you see him dealing with the other Irishmen, you're sure it's Al baby in disguise, pulling...
...really was. Cinema takes violence from life, not the other way around. Americans treat westerns with too much rhetoric." The same is true, he believes, with the U.S. view of the Prohibition era. So he plans to treat U.S. audiences to his own bloodshot view of the good old gangster days. But before he hangs up his spurs, he wants to make one last, big, $7,000,000 epic called Once Upon a Time, There Was America (titles were never his strong point), which he says "won't leave any more to be said about the West." It will...
...world is ready to adjudge America as an excessively violent country in which brutal, irrational force can erupt any minute on a massive scale. This view is reinforced by the sheer driving energy of the U.S. It seems confirmed by the American folklore of violence-the Western and the gangster saga-which audiences all over the world worship as epic entertainment and as a safe refuge for dreams of lawless freedom. In a very different way, the view of America the Violent is also reinforced by the Vietnamese war, in which critics both at home and abroad profess...