Word: knife
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...bourgeois ideal has really been liquidated behind the Iron Curtain, the Polish drama Knife in the Water does little to prove it. In telling the tale of a Warsaw couple's sailboat holiday, writer-director Roman Polanski depicts a Communist life complete with portable radios and Prince Albert tobacco. More surprisingly, the story makes no effort to grapple with the ideological issues its materialism raises. The striking affluence of the characters is ignored and they are examined without regard to the society that surrounds them...
...driver, a dapper sports-writer of forty, is challenged by the youth's self-as-surance and invites the lad to spend the day on a boat with him and his handsome wife. The boy accepts and the three set to sea. With him the boy brings a knife--a phallic, contractile affair. "I'm a hiker," he explains. "I use it to cut through things." In time the knife comes to represent masculinity and the balance of strength on the boat...
...final confrontation, the man throws the knife overboard and knocks the boy (who has protested that he can't swim)in after it. The lad disappears and the wife, convinced that he has drowned, berates her husband as a murderer and a coward. The man, beaten and scared, leaves the boat and swims for shore. From behind a buoy, where he has been hiding, the boy swims back to the boat and triumphantly seduces the wife...
...Knife's success testifies to its breadth of appeal. This summer the movie won the International Film Critics Award at Venice and took First Prize at the New York Film Festival. With subtitles in a score of languages the film is presently touring the world. It is a sensitive story well told, and it is one more proof that fine cinema demands neither gargantuan budgets nor stunt men. May it live to laugh at Cleopatra...
...after the war (he renounced Communism in 1949, the year his opera Regina appeared), but kept a spare set of sharks' teeth pearly white, dear, for the English adaptation of Brecht's Threepenny Opera, which ran six years off-Broadway, made a jukebox gigolo of Mack the Knife; in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where police charged three sailors with beating him to death...