Word: loved
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This time the story is about a formerly married jingles composer who gets to thinking about his lost college love, coincidentally discovers her whereabouts, wins her briefly, loses her, then wins her for good at the last freeze frame. But the formula remains the same: earnestness, good nature and sophomoric romanticism substituted for wit, intelligence and style, with Brooks' music smeared over everything, like gooey frosting. The picture is shot in the manner of the TV commercials Brooks used to do, and his people display all the nuances we've come to expect from citizens who really care...
...simple story: a provincial boy and girl fall in love despite their parents' objections and plan to elope to Paris. His father dies as they are about to leave, and the girl, not knowing why he missed the train, goes on without him-to become Adolphe Menjou's lavishly kept woman in the capital. Later they meet, there is promise of love's renewal, but circumstances and her lover's priggishness intervene. Tragedy and then a coda at once ironic and uplifting end the picture...
...film was made as a vehicle for Edna Purviance, the female lead in 35 early Chaplin comedies and, it seems, the first great love of his life. It beautifully suits her talent, for she makes the transformation from the naive country girl to the worldly courtesan (and back again) with ease. Better still, the woman she becomes has a way of flashing glimpses of the girl she once was that is very touching, mostly because it is so effortless and unselfconscious...
...from Chaplin's pictures and autobiographical material. What one gathers from viewing the Patterson film and A Woman of Paris is that the two male figures in the latter represent two contradictory sides of Chaplin's nature, which he tried to gloss over. Purviance's first love is an artist, but rather a bourgeois one. His mother shares his garret with him, and his paintings, like his dress and manner, are rather staid. He sentimentalizes virtue, just as Chaplin did in the soppier passages of his own work. As the documentary makes clear, Chaplin himself aspired...
...Gulag III Solzhenitsyn abandons the thesis that Soviet totalitarianism could not have developed had there been resistance from below. "A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf," he once raged. "We didn't love freedom enough. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!" If only people had fended off their arresting officers with pokers instead of cowering "like rabbits in their warrens, paling with terror," then the cursed machine would have come to a halt," he added...