Word: gauntlet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hatfield and McCoy feud between N.Y. and L.A. is fueled at Broadway's Biltmore Theater by Furth's comic sniper fire. In Director Gene Saks' nimble hands, the characters suffer the gauntlet of Pacific perils from mudslides to brushfires to shudderingly mirthful earthquakes. Furth's people are antic and simpatico. Mae (Betty Garrett) has been an offstage mother to her orchestra conductor son since he first brandished a baton. That he is 40 and a bachelor mortifies her, but not as much as having blurted out on a TV interview that he was not a homosexual...
With the flourish of a man assured of his political popularity and the righteousness of his electoral mandate, the President last week threw down the gauntlet to Congress. Said Ronald Reagan at his press conference: "I am asking Congress today to deliver to my desk before the August recess not one, but two bills-a spending bill and a tax bill." Determined to alter the direction of Federal Government and, as he put it, "rescue the economy from high inflation and high unemployment," Reagan has become impatient with those Congressmen who have flinched at supporting his new economic proposals. "There...
That was understandable. The Americans had been divided by their captors into at least two groups for transportation to the airport in buses with blackened windows. The Americans then were run through a gauntlet of chanting militants. While some hostages thought the dozens of militants forming a corridor to shout "Death to America!" at them were just performing for propaganda effect, others were genuinely frightened and reported that they had been kicked and shoved during their last steps on Iranian soil...
...even should a thousand Quixotes astride Democratic donkeys sally forth to take up the gauntlet, they stand no chance. The American majority will sleep blissfully for the next 10 or 15 years--they years when our slide gains invisible but irresistible momentum--dreaming only of increased discretionary income. Reagan and his ilk, assuming they can avoid war and keep the Pentagon to five sides, will be able to solve inflation in the short run, and that's all that really troubles Americans. Reduced government spending, coupled with a traditional industrial base growing to meet the demands of Betamax-hungry consumers...
...violent action demands justification from the rest of the movie, in some way, and that one way of justifying violence is to make a great movie; by killing some people the audience cares about, in an early scene like this, the director can in effect throw down the gauntlet to himself. Cassavetes is not a squeamish director--he has no qualms about killing off bad guys, and more than once. But he chooses to bail out in this scene, and from that point on it is clear what kind of movie this is going...