Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...kind of cohesive blocs that other groups have formed. The Republican Party is preeminently Wasp; yet it has been rent for generations by deep-seated disagreements. Norman Mailer characterized the alienated delegates lusting for liberal blood at the 1964 convention. In a typical Mailer caricature, he evoked a "Wasp Mafia where the grapes of wrath were stored. Not for nothing did the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have a five-year subscription to Reader's Digest and National Geographic, high colonies and arthritis, silver-rimmed spectacles, punched-out bellies and that air of controlled schizophrenia which is the merit badge...
Skidoo. Otto Preminger's films have always been happiest when occupied with slightly soiled people with sordid problems in grubby environments. Needless to say, a confrontation between the Hippies and the Mafia offers Preminger a field day, and in my opinion, Skidoo is very great indeed. But Preminger is almost impossible to discuss. Most people hate his films--I think he's the only major American director working steadily today, and before I advance a tentative explanation or two, a couple of immediate points might be stated: Skidoo is hysterically funny, although many people will disagree...
...much to do with the ultimate failure of Preminger's struggling protagonists. But increasingly, external dramatic pressures play a less important part--the determining factor becoming instead Preminger's own camera treatment of space, his cross-cutting techniques, his ultimate vision. No one seeing Skidoo can deny that the Mafia threat (central to the plot) is secondary in moving the action to the power of Preminger's decision to control personally the behavior of his characters and the structure of his film, disregarding saner methods of storytelling. The abrupt insertion of musical numbers, for example, or the prison escape sequence...
...numbered accounts have been exploited, but they put most of the blame on the 100 or so foreign-owned banks in their country and only a handful of small, Swiss-owned institutions. They insist that, contrary to legend, the biggest banks do not cater to South American dictators or Mafia magnates. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the thousands of numbered accounts belong to Europeans rather than Americans...
...poet in Russia say that they are certain he sent the wire to the Soviet leaders. Evtushenko was so sickened by the invasion, Styron reports, that he told him in a dubious comparison: "Now we Russians are just like you Americans; we are part of the international power Mafia...