Word: mad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...problems begin with the choice of material. Cheever's best stories are not merely chronicles of upper-middle-class life, but Kafkaesque tragedies about what happens when a rigorously ordered world starts to go mad. Instead of dramatizing tales from the two major Cheever story collections, The Enormous Radio and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, PBS has selected trifles from The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. These are then stretched out to fill an hour each...
...Music illuminates a person through and through, and it is also his last hope and final refuge. And even half-mad Stalin, a beast and a butcher, instinctively sensed that about music. That's why he feared and hated...
...director schooled in the stylistic demands of black humor might have coaxed a few laughs from the material. Director Norman Jewison (Rollerball, F.I.S.T.) is not that man. His movie's helter-skelter tone swivels irrationally and usually heads straight for a dead end. Mad scenes, broad comic bits and mournful monologues are so indiscriminately mixed that the audience often does not know how to respond. At one point the movie comes to a halt so that we can go on a supposedly comic helicopter ride. There are also pointless interludes in which the hero visits his humorless grandfather...
Most of all it lacks enthusiasm. For two months Theroux's only travelling companion is his grumpiness. For 400 pages we have to put up with both of them. For example, when caught in the mad pre-game rush of a Guatemalan soccer match, all he thinks about is leaving. Throughout the book Theroux keeps asking whether it's worth the trouble. An unadventurous adventurer, he skips carnivals and sidesteps invitations at every turn, like the man who goes to a museum and refuses to look at the pictures...
McKay, driven mad by his bees, returns to the East. Once removed from the constant press of the wilderness, he becomes a standard of social stability. "In the midst of this epoch of disintegration, McKay's machinery stitched the uppers to the lowers." McKay lives on Arrow St., in a blue house with yellow trim. He keeps a garden whose products he shares with each year's graduates. A satisfied man, he at last encounters the bees with equanimity...