Word: louts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This becalmed, almost Chekhovian household is about to be consumed in a flash fire of passion. A young villager is hired to be both gardener and chauffeur. Oliver (Tom Waites) is a muscular lout and nothing to look at, but one lazy, empty afternoon, Molly seduces...
Consider the plot. The girl Anna (Ullmann), casually abandoned by her drink-sodden seagoing father (Robert Donley), is seduced by a teen-age lout. Via instant replay she becomes a whore. Ill (the wages of sin), she returns to her father's barge. There she meets the Irish stoker Mat Burke, who is played by John Lithgow like a brain-numbed victim of killer bees. Naturally, these two crippled creatures fall in love. Anna confesses her past. Since Mat is a pre-ecumenical Roman Catholic, he is appalled that he has fallen for an unclean woman. But she tells...
...Didion book is free of subliminal aggression: among Charlotte's accomplishments is the ability to perform emergency tracheotomies. She can also catch chickens and snap their necks with one smooth motion. Warren is a monstrous lout and a failure whose "face had been coarsened by contempt," whose "mind had been coarsened by self-pity." Their daughter Marin ("good strong hair and an I.Q. of about 103") grows up to be a skyjacker and a fugitive Marxist. Her resemblance to Patty Hearst can hardly be coincidental. Charlotte's second husband is also a familiar type out of the recent...
...both the worldly Carruthers and Davies, whom Carruthers has always patronized but comes to admire. There is, of course, a damsel in distress - Clara, whose Englishness in the midst of Germans gives away the plot a bit early. But who cares? A man would have to be a brutish lout not to fall for Clara, with her "brown, firm hand - no, not so very small, my sentimental reader...
Since when do we concern ourselves with a lout, a boor and a phony like Brando? For God's sake spare...