Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...audibility problems inherent in theater in the round. As the actors careen about the stage, whipping out their lines, each section of the audience gets to hear a few words, but no one hears the entire sentence. While this mayhem may be intended to suggest the decline of human sensitivity and individualism, it succeeds only in depicting the decline of good diction...
...very good actor--he's usually much too stiff and rather boring--but something in Dracula tapped the best of him. True, it was an impersonal vampire, a far cry from Langella's more complex lover. But Bram Stoker's Dracula is not much of human being, either. Lee was such a commanding Dracula, statuesque and solemn but with tremendous reserves of strength, capable of exploding at any given instant into blazing, hellish fury. Yet he was also capable of displaying a kind of cynical tenderness that lulled his victims into a trance before he turned animal and sank...
...back, that you can't keep a good man down, that you can't put a stake through your own heart of darkness. So we return to our isolated hells, knowing that he has the answer to our terminal loneliness, our inability to know--really know--other human beings: ingest them...
...gift for getting full documentary value out of his lo cation. There are a few moments when the picture's easygoing pace turns into wobbliness, but these are insignificant compared with its many moments of shrewd insight into the lives of amusingly shaded but very recognizable human beings. This is the kind of small, star less film that big studios sometimes do not know what to do with. Audiences should have no such difficulty. They will, if they have any sense, simply cherish it. -Richard Schickel
...Frisco Kid just misses being very good, perhaps because although Wilder is funny and endearing, we never quite believe in the character he plays. He is not really a pure Polish rabbi, he is Gene Wilder doing bits. We are asked to laugh at all too human failings, as we laugh at Tevye's in Fiddler on the Roof, but through some lapse of direction or acting, we are never really shown a man. - John Skow