Word: insightfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...turbulent decades" of the union's history, beginning in untutored idealism and ending in equally unconscious corruption, suffers from the same flaw as do the fictions that have slunk out from under Harold Robbins' overcoat in recent years: what might be called the substitution of analogy for insight. In other words, the writers who create them seem to think it is enough to show us characters who, they suggest with a wink (or more often a brutal slam in the ribs), are just like the famous people we are always reading about in the press. Whereupon they offer...
...does the script, for which Stallone receives co-credit. It offers no psychological insight into what makes a Hoffa, and no historical insight into how the American labor movement so quickly deteriorated into self-serving materialism. That is perhaps excusable; what can you expect from people who not only were not present at the creation, but also never brush up against the modern working man except when they take their Mercedes in for repair...
What is difficult to understand is the film's utter lack of moral insight. One suspects that Stallone kept hoping to turn his labor leader into another Rocky, for, although his hero keeps trafficking with gangsters and tolerates much graft among his fellow unionists, he never gets upset about it because he 1) never takes anything for himself, and 2) insists that wretched means justify his ends: a strong union that enables its members finally to enjoy the pleasures of owning their very own campers, motorboats and other ecologically unsound objects. An actor, or writer, of parts might have...
Apparently neither Stallone nor anyone else who worked on this picture could bear to part with the lumpish likability that all tried so hard to establish at the beginning. In the end they sacrifice everything-insight, morality, a dramatic arc-to preserve intact their star's only known quality, best described as a sort of vulgar affability...
...England). British Biographer George Painter attempts to resurrect the legend by resuscitating the man. Author of a highly acclaimed and exhaustively researched biography of Proust, Painter has produced the first part of a projected three-volume study. Like its predecessor, it promises to be a model of organization and insight...