Word: mercilessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...voter rebellion has considerable justification. The U.S. urgently needs radical reforms in the way that it collects, apportions and spends tax money. But for the moment, the taxpayer revolt is only tightening an already merciless squeeze on the budgets of most of the nation's 81,299 governmental units. At a time when public officials should be planning to finance the pollution-control, mass-transit and slum-rebuilding programs of the future, they are having to struggle to stretch present revenues to cover immediate spending needs. Increasingly, they are failing...
...city in the days before the election. They are a dubious form of political evangelism, costing millions of dollars, exhausting President and people alike. They may even be harmful politically. So many major stops are jammed into a day, and a President repeats himself like any other candidate. The merciless and omnipresent eyes and ears of TV often show him at day's end as a repetitive bore...
Some movies are so inventive and powerful that they can be viewed again and again and each time yield up fresh illuminations. Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is such a movie. Based on Anthony Burgess's 1963 novel of the same title, it is a merciless, demoniac satire of a near future terrorized by pathological teen-age toughs. When it opened last week, TIME Movie Critic Jay Cocks hailed it as "chillingly and often hilariously believable." Below, TIME'S art critic takes a further look at some of its aesthetic implications...
...Clockwork Orange, based on the Anthony Burgess novel, is a merciless, demoniac satire in the future imperfect. It posits a world somehow gone berserk, in which there are no real alternatives, only degrees of madness. Kubrick makes the whole thing (as he did in Dr. Strangelove) chillingly and often hilariously believable. Alex, so contemptuously in control, soon becomes a victim of his own lunatic society...
...classic heroic response to a virtually feudal situation. Yet David, in defending himself against the threat to what Robert Ardrey would call his territorial imperative, soon becomes as bestial as the attackers. Peckinpah asserts with gripping, merciless logic that any man, no matter how cold or cowardly, is capable of committing the most appalling violence -and of enjoying it. "You never took a stand," Amy accuses David early in the film; when he finally does, he acts not from any sense of honor but from animal instinct. The assault on the cottage and his defense of it produce...