Word: handyman
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Noon Wine is close in feeling to Peckinpah's prizewinning movie, Ride the High Country. A strange, withdrawn, harmonica-playing Swede (Per Oscarsson) arrives at the small Texas spread owned by an ignorant farmer named Thompson (Jason Robards Jr.). The Swede signs on as a handyman, and in the course of three years not only tunes up the farm operations to perfect pitch but slides, in his remote way, into the heart of the family...
Then, what seemed to be a quiet genre painting is suddenly ripped by violence. A stranger appears, announcing with grinning malevolence that the handyman has escaped from an insane asylum and must return. When the stranger pulls a knife, Thompson kills him. The rest of the play shows Thompson, acquitted by a jury, bleakly, desperately dragging his sickly wife (Olivia de Havilland) from one neighbor's house to another to defend himself and his deed. Then he blows his brains...
Grape Wine portrays Wyeth's friend and handyman Willard Snowden. Since 1964, he has painted the wine-loving Negro drifter often in wistful poses suggestive of eternal human patience. Says Wyeth: "He gave me a chance to paint something timeless, ageless, endless. He's all of the Brandywine Valley, its dankness and brooding power...
...just a handyman, a fixer, carefully pared and peeled down from every commitment but to his own identity. His wife has left him for a goy. He leaves his village ("an island surrounded by Russia") for a new life beyond the Pale-the ghetto areas that the Czar designated for the Jews. He also leaves behind him the Law, takes off in a ramshackle, horse-drawn contraption for the future. He has shed everything but Spinoza, whom he had read by night in his ratty hut, and from whom he gleaned the notion that man is without history, God merely...
...Handyman & Thief. Gennaro is coffinmaker, wreathmaker, funeral-insurance salesman, handyman, business manager, and hearse driver. He is also poor, and in Naples that means powerless. Caught without a chauffeur's license, he is slapped with a staggering fine and forbidden to drive. In debt for tobacco, rent, and worst of all, for coffin lumber, he limps through one hand-mangling day heaving shovelfuls of earth for a huge industrial corporation-and gets fired for incompetence. Employed in a sizzling restaurant kitchen, he is falsely accused of theft, gets fired again...