Word: gorillas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...emotionally satisfying and morally gratifying comedies of recent times. Perhaps because of an almost geometrically balanced structure, it has powerful persuasiveness when it moves the audience to the wilder shores of farce. Any movie that can punish a villain by involving him in a homosexual love affair with a gorilla and make the situation both plausible and risible is a picture to be reckoned with...
...this fateful transformation of his character. He feels his claws growing, a furtive and dejected, an impudent and servile look creeps into his eyes. His lips become thin, sharp, Jesuitical, his nose pinched and sharp, his nostrils dilated and bloodless; his knees sag, his arms grow long, and dangle gorilla-like. Those who uphold the Theory of Race and deny the influence of environment on the development of the human being should spend a year in prison and observe themselves daily in a mirror...
...gorilla mouthing the prayer for the dead over a human being? Malamud, who once called for fiction "filled with love, beauty and hope," has now written a novel filled with death, bestiality and despair. Why has he called it God's Grace?Even in fiction, his grace must mean more than man's disgrace. -By Patricia Blake
...plot is equally enigmatic. When the ark is beached on a tropical island, Cohn and Buz encounter other creatures: a gorilla, eight baboons and eight chimps! which are quickly given such names as Esau and Saul of Tarsus. On every day save the Sabbath, Cohn lectures the apes on the obligations of freedom, the American Constitution, the Big Bang, the nature of evil and other elevated subjects. On Passover he conducts a Seder for the sapient monkeys, except for the intractable gorilla, who will attend only to the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead...
...attempt"). The fact that only Cohn and Mary Madelyn have sex, producing a baby, causes the beasts to go amuck. In a lunatic re-enactment of both Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac and of the Crucifixion, Cohn is killed by the apes. In a final tableau, the gorilla dons a yarmulke and "in his throaty, gruff voice" recites the Kaddish...