Word: hubert
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...Hubert Humphrey, a giant...
...often Hubert Humphrey was seen only as the ebullient eternal optimist, a Don Quixote verbally tilting at windmills and dreaming the impossible dream. But his idealism lifted us to share in that dream and, in so doing, his idealism conquered our skepticism...
...hold closely to a short story by Joseph Conrad called The Duel. Conrad was fascinated by obsession, by the kind of craziness carried so far beyond the reasonable delusions of ordinary men that it acquires a kind of grandeur. In The Duellists a young hussar lieutenant named D'Hubert (Keith Carradine), an unexceptional man, collides with another lieutenant named Feraud (Harvey Keitel). Feraud is a strutting, bloody-minded fool, and he challenges D'Hubert to a duel. Though D'Hubert knows that the matter is silly, honor forces him to fight. Feraud is wounded, though not severely...
...Feraud has the mentality of a yapping farm dog, and when his wound has healed he forces another duel. And another. There is peace between the two men only in time of war ("Duels between nations take absolute precedence," one of D'Hubert's brother officers says cynically). Feraud remains crazed with hatred, and D'Hubert, though he cannot remember the original cause of the quarrel and is quite willing to forget the feud, continues to dance to honor's tune and his adversary's whim...
Though Feraud's mania never subsides, and though D'Hubert thinks him contemptible, the two are bound together in something that is almost comradeship. The mad intensity of their relationship burns away what in another film would be the excess of landscapes too beautifully framed and interiors too cunningly photographed. The Duellists uses the beauty of the French landscape to comment gently on the frenzy of the men bloodying themselves in its soft fields. In the end, after a resolution of sorts has been achieved between the two men, Feraud stands, back to the camera, looking...