Word: lovelies
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...document that survival. Yet some 60 years and five or six continents later, the characters in his books still muddle on, oppressed by this same unshakeable world-weariness. They find themselves in the thick of Third World liberation struggles, but somehow never take the politics seriously. They fall in love, but always with the assumption that love will never last. In fits of decency they even relinquish their ideological aloofness to take partisan stands, but never so much out of conviction as out of a shrugging sense that if you have to go about the tiresome business of living...
...although it's almost a maxim in Greene's world that cynics will always be cynics, the novelist usually does try to convince us that under their hard shells his anti-heroes really do want desperately to believe. If not in politics or in love, (at least not for long), then in religion and the afterlife. The place they perpetually go in Greene's novels to quaff their spiritual thirst is the Catholic Church; and if their inability to take God seriously keeps them from having faith, at least they can while away their time feeling guilty. The most successful...
Brooks freaks who love to see people farting or punching out horses and those who expect outrageously funny dialogue will be equally disappointed by High Anxiety. The movie, dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock and filled with little imitations of the master, just isn't very funny, except in a few spots. Once again, the film is a Brooks extravaganza--he wrote, produced, directed, starred and out-did himself this by writing the words and music to the title song. You'll never guess who sings...
This gets annoying if you are in the least bit conscious of plausibility or consistency with previous action. Why, after practicing Laraine Newman's song "ABC" do the "Chesterfields" sing "Why Do Fools Fall In Love" at the rock and roll show? For that matter, how did the "Chesterfields" get signed up to do the show? There is some intimation that Freed means to do this for them; it is clear he likes them, but the scene in which they are told they will perform is missing...
...each other throughout the whole movie. We are meant to think t hat it's the magic of the moment and they really liked each other anyway, but this is implausible if one attends to their characters, which are wonderful and funny, but not the sort that fall in love. In short, this movie delegates to the viewer the creation of a large portion of the screenplay. I personally was disappointed that I could not receive a credit, for I had to work quite a bit to keep the whole thing straight...