Word: marathonic
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...dance marathon a craze largely unknown to the post-war generation, is one of the saddest cultural artifacts of the Great Depression. These widely publicized exercises in masochism, in which couples would compete to see who could stay on a dance floor the longest (sometimes two and three months), were actually the cruelest of promotional gimmicks. The businessmen who ran them charged admission to the sadistic audiences who watched, solicited business "sponsors" for the couples-and cleaned up in the process. Even the grand prize offered to the winners would be a phony: the marathon's "bills" would suddenly...
...movie, director Sydney Pollack has kept the action almost entirely within the seedy California beach-side dance hall where the novel's marathon takes place. The film covers 60-odd days of the spectacle in two hours-and, after it's over, all sixty days are real to you. The color is sickly; the machinations of the contest are unbelievably brutal; the physical and emotional crack-ups of the participants are staggering and sometimes all but impossible to watch...
...game is something. The marathon is a handy metaphor for just about everything that's wrong with America: capitalistic manipulation and dehumanization: the physical and spiritual bankruptcy of the California frontier; the war mentality of the competitive nature of American life. Much of this is brought home (sometimes too explicitly) by the frighteningly familiar em???, played by Gig Young...
JIMMY BRESLIN has already said that this is the best movie to date about Vietnam and-while others have said the same thing about such pictures as Alice's Restaurant. The Wild Bunch, and Tell Them Willie. Boy Is Here -I think Breslin may be right. The marathon-with its dark violence, applauding spectators, POW-camp-like barracks, and lack of sane causality-may just be the best medium yet for showing the apocalyptic insanity the war has brought to this country...
...reason why the marathon works so well as a context for American sickness is the ferocity with which director Pollack has depicted it. Some shots-the faces of the tortured contestants as they run two "derby" races during the marathon, a juxtaposition of Sarrazin and a trashcan with a surreal beachscape, the reflection of Susannah York's delirious face in a shower head-knock you over with sheer force. The depression-era detail (posters for Grand Hotel and band music like "The Best Things in Life are Free") and the editing (often utilizing sound cues such as sirens and gunshots...