Word: loree
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This movie, a fitful action adventure starring an excellent Robert Mitchum, must first explain all about the Yakuza to uninitiated Westerners, so that the whole opening seems like an orientation course. The plot that has been contrived to go along with all this Yakuza lore is not a wieldy thing either. It has to do mostly with layers of intrigue and betrayal that end when Mitchum and a single ally (the engagingly somber Takakura Ken) take on what looks like the entire criminal population of Tokyo. This face-off makes for a bloody and modestly spectacular finale...
...told the story, now Steve's lore, of how no one would give him credit or rent him space, how he did everything on a shoestring and by himself, and how the place had grown unexpectedly from a tiny operation into an instant success--a business with 25 workers. And how, with so much of himself invested in it, he refused huge sums of money everyday from people who wanted to buy the store or the name and start franchises of the business...
Save for a few anecdotes about Marlon Brando, the novel skimps on backstage gossip and theatrical lore. One of Sonny's more probing thoughts about his profession is "Crap's better in an English accent." Maybe. Laurence Olivier reading The Understudy aloud might improve it, but not enough...
CREAMER ALSO excels in capturing the lore of Ruth out-of-uniform. In "Kaleidoscope: Personality of the Babe," Creamer delves into a few feats which make the 714 and 60 homerun marks pall. He dredged up some of Babe's stunning epicurean exploits, including the mandatory "couple of hotdogs and a bicarb" immediately preceding every game. And several locker room observers, provide the definitive statement on Ruth's famed sexual prowess. Creamer dwells on the theme of Ruth's distorted sexuality throughout the book, in his usual lucid style...
...WORLD OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN. 400 pages. National Geographic Society. $9.95. Ten authorities on Indian lore have contributed solid chapters to this volume, but their texts run a gauntlet of illustrations, maps and photographs. This makes the package interesting not only to serious readers but also to browsers, who can find something worth looking at on nearly every page: 19th century paintings of Indian ceremonies and battles, color photographs of Indian lands, tools and dwellings. Nearly 600 different tribes (from Abenaki to Zuni) settled in the U.S. and Canada, and the book more or less manages to do justice...