Word: herds
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...made the collar-an earnest highway patrolman named Slide (Michael Sacks), whose lectures on police procedures, vehicular maintenance and the prevention of marital discord make him first a hostage, then an accomplice. Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson), the cop who organizes the comical pursuit of the miscreants, must ride herd on his trigger-happy associates. He must also keep the inevitable crowds of reporters and television crewmen from turning events into a media circus. In neither endeavor is he entirely successful...
Still, the real show may be behind the scenes. Any performance of Les Troyens is a miracle of calibration. In the pit, Conductor Rafael Kubelik uses everything but radar to maintain contact with seven assistant conductors. They are backstage with walkie-talkies to communicate with each other as they herd bands and choruses around the platforms, often walking in the opposite direction from the motion of the turntable. When film sequences start to roll, Kubelik's tempos must not vary by more than four seconds from performance to performance...
...below even the characteristically low standards of taste and fairness on which The Crimson prides itself. I can hardly imagine either Mr. Schoen or The Crimson referring to the New American Movement as "a dirty bunch of wimps and faggots" or to the Radcliffe Women's Organization as "a herd of bovine eunuchs," although I don't know, perhaps they would if either group had the temerity to invite the Vice President to Boston. What justification is there, then, for directing such vituperative abuse at the Harvard Republican Club? Mr. Schoen's clumsy attempt to demonstrate his ideological machismo...
Rhinoceros, intact, is a scathing fairy tale, a parable about how everyone in a large town turns into a rampaging herd of large, loud, one-horned beasts. The lone holdout is a slightly sodden dreamer called Stanley (Gene Wilder), who regrets his inability to metamorphose, but who finally comes to realize the tenuous value of individuality. Stanley is a reluctant combatant and the winner of a dubious victory. His final assertion ("I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end") is as much an assertion of uncertainty as defiance, a bolster...
...virtuoso performance, including a long, bumpy transformation from man into rhino. But the control that Brustein admired is not so apparent under O'Horgan's direction. Mostel, unchecked and unchallenged, easily skids into self-parody. Still, his billowing, bellowing metamorphosis into another member of the herd does provide the movie's only moments of real laughter, fleeting as they are, and as desperately uncomfortable as Mostel seems...