Word: grand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When he was called last month to testify before a Cincinnati grand jury investigating a prison escape, the Rev. Maurice McCrackin refused to appear. He was a key witness because he had been kidnaped and held hostage by two convicts who had broken out of the Lucasville, Ohio, penitentiary...
...five months I worked on that newspaper. But now I have a photograph of him hanging above my desk. He's standing on a plot of farmland in rural and red-neck Yadkin County, grinning broadly, wearing green silk robes and cradling a machine gun. Joe Grady was the Grand Dragon of North Carolina's Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan...
...movie begins and ends in a pious condemnation of street life from a traditional, middle-class, Midwestern, Protestant perspective--a perspective which seems as foreign to Schrader as California is to Scott's bewildered father. Schrader's prototypes of middle class life, Grand Rapids, is nothing but a collection of hokey cliches. In the first five minutes, we see sledding kids, skating kids, kids watching TV, kids delivering the newspaper, daddies shoveling the sidewalk, mommy driving the car. Then comes religion--the snowy church, icons on the wall, grace before dinner, and discussions of sin among the men. The images...
Very, very slowly, the story unfolds. Young Christin (played by Ilah Davis in an unfortunate debut) vanishes into scummy California. Her distraught father flies down, and, unsatisfied by police efforts to find her, hires a sleezy private dick played by Peter Boyle. Back in Grand Rapids Scott wanders around looking sad. Even religion isn't fun anymore. Finally Boyle shows up and coyly presents Scott with a low-rent porn flick starring his daughter. Scott reacts to the screening in predictable stages of disbelief, grief and rage. So where is the girl? Still missing...
When Schrader wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver, he managed to create a tension between the hard core or 'new morality' and the religious ferocity of the old morality within the character of Travis Bickle. In Hardcore, Schrader relies on the obvious: Grand Rapids family life and California street life confront one another on the screen. His device is too simple, and the extreme images have no force. The director's lack of involvement with the film lowers it to the level of a porn film. Schrader uses a classic box-office formula--a little sex and scandal combined with...