Word: idol
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LOOKING BACK OVER Vittorio De Sica's career is to uncover a list of contradictions; a brave man and great filmmaker, or a genius at political compromise and a mediocre director, even a matinee idol or consummate actor. During the post-World War II decade in a battered, guiltridden Italy, he was in the vanguard of the New Realism, and thereby a prominent figure under attack by his country's outraged government, clergy and film critics. In critical circles outside Italy, his cinematic results were considered brilliant (Shoeshine, 1946; Bicycle Thief, 1948; Umberto D, 1950); the ensuing wrath he incurred...
...games by ousting 30 to 40 of the world's top skiers, he and the I.O.C. settled on one scapegoat. Just three days before the opening of the Sapporo games, and by a compromise vote of 28 to 14, the committee agreed to disqualify Schranz, a veteran ski idol and a favorite in the men's downhill...
...that will remain after most of the rest of the plot has been cut away for a workable script-is about a Mexican-American Air Force sergeant who shoots and kills a hippie drug dealer on a military base in the Southwest. The longhair, a local counterculture idol, had deflowered the sergeant's rambling rose of a daughter...
...Chevalier was a partner-and lover-of the famed cabaret singer and dancer Mistinguett. Later he went on to star alone at the Folies-Bergère and the Casino de Paris. In the late '20s and early '30s he became a very highly paid American movie idol. Even Greta Garbo, for a fleeting moment, once felt that it might be nice to be with him. "Do you know how to swim, Monsieur Chevalier?" Greta asked at a dinner party in Hollywood. "Mais oui," replied Chevalier hesitantly. "Then let's go for a dip in the ocean...
Karl Marx would laugh a knowing laugh in the midst of our presidential campaign. Deprived of an idol who somehow seems capable of transmitting a sense of purposeful unity and of moral social enterprise, longing for a human god to awaken us to our future and to make idealism fashionable, the activists of our country, the students of the first moratorium and their parents, the New Frontiersmen, retreat into despair and acknowledged political impotence...