Word: master
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...social history. It takes its cue not so much from the buddy films as from Warner Bros. melodramas of the '30s, like Black Legion and They Won't Forget, which seized some social-issue headlines and fit them into brisk, dynamic fiction. % It is movie journalism: tabloid with a master touch. And the master, the suave manipulator, is Alan Parker. By avocation he is a caricaturist, and by vocation too. He chooses gross faces, grand subjects, base motives, all for immediate impact. The redneck conspirators are drawn as goofy genetic trash: there's not a three-digit...
...protagonist -- who except Hitler could root against a pre- pubescent? -- and a prime villain. Colonel Gregor Laemmle, the SS officer in pursuit of Thomas, is far more than the usual posturing sadist. A former philosophy professor, he is a connoisseur of art and literature and something of a chess master himself. Laemmle regards the hunting of Thomas as a large- scale tournament, with gambits to be savored even when they go against the Germans...
Edward is a dog, a sad-eyed but otherwise lively Welsh corgi. When he is upset he makes trouble of a colorful, forgivable kind. Macon Leary (William Hurt) is his master, also sad-eyed, but with no redeeming manners or habits. Early in this lugubrious recounting of his struggle against clinical depression, one begins counting the minutes between dog cutaways. By the end, one is praying for them...
Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis), who insinuates herself into Macon's life by becoming Edward's trainer, does wonders for both of them. Doggy learns to heel, master learns to lighten up. Or so we are supposed to believe, though it is very hard to tell the difference between William Hurt sad and William Hurt happy, so monotonous is his performance of a monosyllabic role...
...plots with consistent good humor and remarkable insider erudition. The latter should come as no surprise, given the author's extensive background in the theater and academe; as a young man he was an actor in Britain's Old Vic Company, and he later served 20 years as the master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. The novel is crammed with funny renditions of wheezy professorial badinage and flamboyant dramatic monologues. But it is Davies' own voice that seems most memorable: confident, unhurried, interested and amused. Late in the novel, on the brink of the opera's opening...