Word: gum
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...Just plain old good times as America enjoyed peace and prosperity. Even Ike, the first dad-president, could spend his time playing golf. Nothing seemed too serious. Letter sweaters and class rings were the concerns of the day, as swarms of teenage boys tried to make out with reluctant gum-chewing teenage girls. Considering, though, that these "fabulous '50s" turned into the "turbulent '60s," it would seem that America suddenly woke up one morning and instead of finding a crew-cut Richie Cunningham on its doorstep, found Abbie Hoffman and a whole lot of trouble...
This land "of delicate, delectable emptiness," named for a vanished biblical kingdom, is also rife with American influence. Racial mixing can produce beautiful results; cultural miscegenation tends toward ludicrous juxtapositions. The snap of bubble gum is heard in the Koran school. Fashionably oversize sunglasses are worn by women in purdah while their denimed daughters in platform shoes kick up the dust in the streets of Istiqlal, the capital. Down in the slums the click of cal abashes and the muezzin's call to prayer compete with an alien rhythm, "with words, repeated in the tireless ecstasy of religious chant...
...movie follows its robber heroes from their early years as clumsy stickup men through their big score and its legal aftermath. There are some giddy set pieces, most notably a gummed-up bubble gum factory robbery, but it is the intimate moments and throwaway wisecracks that pay off best. This is due in no small part to Friedkin's cast, which is full of idiosyncratic comic actors who delight in playing amiable lowlife slobs...
...Winthrop players rise to the challenge with unabashed enthusiasm. Mike Herrmann as the out-of-work actor Diabetes, and George Melrod as Hepatitis both look uncannily like Groucho Marx and play their urban-Jewish-intellectual-neurotic characters to the hilt. Meanwhile, the supporting cast, led by the gum-cracking, orgasm-seeking Phil major from Brooklyn College and Great Neck, Doris Levine (played nicely by Jaleh Poorooshasb), camps and hams through Allen's inspired lunacy. Every new character who walks onstage builds the madness to a higher pitch until the whole stage explodes in a riot of screaming neurotics. Particularly funny...
...laughs off the criticism and is happy that she enjoys the confidence of Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland as well as of her friend Joan Claybrook. On Foreman's 40th birthday Claybrook gave her a gift: a spiky cactus plant. It was festooned like a Christmas tree, with candy, chewing gum and junk food that Foreman had just proposed banning from sale during school lunch hours. Today only a few of the trimmings remain on the tree. The rest, reports Foreman, have been eaten by her sugar-loving staff...