Word: madman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Descent into Hell, Doris Lessing suggests that madmen may be mankind's front-running mutants-the pioneers of "inner space," the avant-garde of a superior race to come. Even John Updike, a traditionalist by temperament, includes in his latest novel, Rabbit Redux, the obligatory resident madman, a "Christ of the New Dark Age." And in the background, like the Muse of the '70s, the brilliant, cracked voice of Sylvia Plath sings out her love-hate sonnet to madness, the theme song of our times...
Scofield is at his most dexterous in Bartleby, bringing extraordinary wit to the rather dreary role of a beleaguered office boss (no name given). The film is adapted from Herman Melville's story Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby (John McEnery) is a kind of saintly madman, an almost ghostly figure employed (as the movie has it) as an accountant in Scofield's office...
...doctor) and rapee (Diana Rigg) fall in love; Scott, his flagging potency restored, finds life worth living again; Rigg is cured of her nymphomania. Meanwhile life-and death-in a big New York City hospital goes on. The story evades numerous intriguing issues: Rigg has a potentially interesting madman for a father. He causes chaos in this wonderland of technological medicine, but he assures us that in Mexico, where he lives almost as a hermit, he gets on very well. Cynical laugh from the sophisticated audience, end of joke...
...them all is a race between an elevated train commandeered by the hired-gun of the French importer, and a car commandeered and furiously driven on the street below by Doyle. Friedkin tries very hard to make the chase both credible and creditably spectacular; the justification for Doyle's madman pursuit is carefully developed: he must stop an armed assassin and, (having just escaped several of that assassin's bullets himself) he is so professionally and personally concerned with catching the man that for the public good he's willing to risk the lives of an avenue-full of passersby...
...chessboard. He has no value except in relation to the whole. The individual is thus said to be an illusion. He doesn't exist. He isn't anything." But lonesco will not tolerate this negation of individuality. He says that in the game he plays the part of the "madman" (the French chess term for what in English is the "bishop"). "The individual, I, the madman, am aware of my personality as a madman...It is an ideological mania these days to put the accent on the group. I for my part am perfectly able to place the emphasis...