Word: manchurian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...patient is sitting up and taking umbrage. After several dolorous books, Richard Condon, no black humorist but an eyeball-red one in the great, ranting days of The Manchurian Candidate and The Oldest Confession, seems to be stirring faintly back to life. Money Is Love does have patches so swampy that even addicted admirers will cast down their eyes in shame, but the life signs are nevertheless strong: "Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson. He swallowed hard. He held it down until...
...unconverted, is pretty tacky. Lee is fleet and exciting as ever in action, and amusing enough playing an Oriental bumpkin in the wicked city. But Revenge appears to have been edited barehanded, possibly by a few karate chops. The actors, whose performances are as broad as the Manchurian border to begin with, are further hampered by a brutal job of dubbing: superimposed English, phrases spilling out of the sound track long after their lips have ceased to move...
...involving a school bus, a shootout in a giant, steaming laundry-can still be summoned up. But the rest of the film is heartless, tasteless and noisily desperate. It is always sad to see an overreacher turn into an underachiever, but to find the tense talent capable of The Manchurian Candidate busying himself with feckless projects like this is infuriating. When Frankenheimer's contempt for the picture is not seeping onto the screen, his weariness is. One wants to (and should) turn away from the spectacle...
Peking is unconvinced. One reason is that the Soviets have recently engaged in harassment of Chinese shipping near the Manchurian border. Late last month the Russians threatened to prevent Chinese boats from using the Ussuri and Amur rivers at the point where they converge. The Soviets claim that the border between the two countries is formed by the narrow Kazakevicheva Channel, which joins the two rivers about 20 miles south of their actual convergence near the Soviet city of Khabarovsk. In a stiff diplomatic note to Peking, the Russians said that they were "ready as before" to allow Chinese ships...
...humane society would let Condon off the hook. His early books, The Oldest Confession, The Manchurian Candidate and A Talent for Loving, are among the maddest funny novels of the last couple of decades. They seemed to have been written by Mephistopheles, raucous with glee at the insane excesses of the human creature. But Condon's last several books have been querulous and scolding...