Word: idealistic
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...acting is also topnotch. Robert Redford's McKay is a perfect seemingly sexless but actually hungry, American idealist; MeIvyn Douglas is fine as his corrupt father; Don Porter, veteran of fatherly roles in TV sitcoms, is well-cast as Crocker Jarmon--rhetorically smooth, with the sincerity of a born exhibitionist and a rockribbed physical facade. But Peter Boyle steals the show as Marvin Lucas, McKay's mysterious New York-based campaign manager. Lucas is tough, and smart, and flexible, a Madison Avenue superman; but in his own oily way we feel he cares more seriously than anyone else...
...writers today who understand police work and can make policemen both believable and human. The most interesting thing about his novel is the squaring off between the young cop, whose name is Bo Lockley, and the police establishment. Bo is an inept, unskeptical idealist, "hurt by animals he didn't know were in the jungle." Of course the foolhardy girl agent should not have been allowed to pursue her plan of seducing the pusher in order to get information. But if she had succeeded, her superiors, who greedily let her risk her life, would have actually looked like effective...
Joan of Arc has been many people to many writers. To Al Carmines, the off-Broadway clergyman-showman (TIME, May 22), she is an idealist with a square build, a butch haircut, a belting voice, and a yen for planting bombs in public toilets for the sake of the revolution...
...major issues of the play are centered in the complex character of Brutus, a man "with himself at war," an idealist who, as it turns out, can no more foretell the dire outcome of his well-meant acts than can Gregers Werle, the great idealist in Ibsen's The Wild Duck. James Ray gives us a Brutus that is reasonably well spoken, and rather restrained as befits an adherent of the Stoic school of philosophy. But he does not reach the deep intellectuality attained by James Mason in the film, and does not sufficiently earn the posthumous tribute paid...
Indeed, these three sides of the man are reflected in Comrade V. The liberal idealist, of course, in the elusive character of V. himself, that would-be reformer in a state without conscience. The anarchist holds sway over the psychiatric demolition of V.'s identity as well as any basis for rational reconstruction of the situation. Finally, the stoic is suggested by the very concept and assembly of this creative, witty fiction, which in commendable contrast to the exiguity of much of contemporary fiction, deserves, if not demands, not only a first but a second reading...