Word: he-man
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Appearances deceive. "Don Pepe," says an admiring countryman, "is a real he-man." Far from being an otherworldly intellectual, Lopez Portillo is a tough-minded leader with an abrasive streak and a bent for professorial oratory: he often salts his speeches with fire-and-brimstone references to the Aztec past. During his state of the union address, for example, in speaking of the oil spill in the Bay of Campeche, he made references to an ancient god and the Aztec mistress of the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes. "In the depths of this flaming well," he intoned, "we Mexicans have seen...
Some of the pummeled husbands are too old or sick to defend themselves, but most are able bodied. One type of victim is the baffled he-man who is afraid of unleashing his own violence. Says Steinmetz: "There is a feeling among beaten men: 'If I ever let go I would kill her.' " Another type is the passive, dependent man who has sought out a strong wife to shield him from worldly problems. Barbara Star, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California, finds that battered spouses are usually people who feel overwhelmed by life...
...noon, and Sam Peckinpah is in a good mood when he arrives on the set. "I had half a can of beer for breakfast," he whispers, "and it tasted great!" Why does the director of so many he-man shoot-'em-ups whisper? No one has ever dared to ask, but as a technique it has its advantages. When Peckinpah whispers, people cup their ears and listen-or they may not be around for whisper No. 2. The mortality rate on the ordinary Peckinpah picture is about half that of lemmings in leap year...
Hemingway and Hollywood have never been a very good match. The moviemakers have tended to play up Papa's most blatant streaks in mawkish romances (A Farewell to Arms), pseudo-profound he-man heroics (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and farragoes of exotic drinks, sports and angst (The Sun Also Rises). The Hemingway adaptation with the most spark left in it today is To Have and Have Not, in which Director Howard Hawks tossed out most of the original novel and wrenched the rest into a racy adventure yarn around Bogart and Bacall...
...spite, or maybe because, of these preoccupations, Pumping Iron is an entertaining film that disappoints what would be common expectations for a bodybuilding flick. Although not a muscle beach spectacular featuring Mike Marvel and his "he-man" friends (in six weeks you can look like this or your money back), the film also would disappoint anyone hoping for an incisive psychological examination of why men would suffer so much pain to deform their bodies. In quasi-documentary form, Pumping Iron cleverly hypes bodybuilding and its main character, Arnold Schwarznegger...