Word: metaphor
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...city, a "honky killer" is gunning down lovers. The police are confounded; no one is free; citizens on the outside are as cursed as the purebreds and mutts on the inside. The bullets ricochet, the gas jets open . . . Here Downey is filming on dangerous ground, here his central metaphor founders-and with it the whole movie. No artist in this century can create a death camp without triggering historical memories of the obscene, of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Dachau. These are monuments of evil, not toys to be manipulated by a gnatweight philosopher...
...moving two blocks down Central Park West, but Jaffe proves incapable of coping with that humdrum task. In a running routine that is a very low mutation of Kafka, Jaffe is consistently unable to persuade the anonymous moving man to move his furnishings. This is supposed to be a metaphor for Jaffe's general ineffectuality; it comes across as merely improbable...
Cataplexy-a sadistic punishment that might have been designed for the ninth circle of Dante's hell-threatens to become a metaphor for the condition of humor in the 1970s. At the moment, the silent absence of laughter is deafening, though the will to laugh is agonizingly there. Where are the wits of yesterday? The game is a humiliation to play...
Help wanted: a '70s version of humorist to save the '70s version of prig. This once and future humorist may already be present. Imprisoned inside every prig, a comedian is signaling wildly to get out. And that, finally, is the metaphor of cataplexy...
...Hoxworth feuds with a polyglut of races while his pineapple princess (Geraldine Chaplin) goes quietly mad. Every time the pace slackens, which is often, someone goes to sea, either to pick up field hands or to transport lepers to Molokai. The incessant ebb and flow is intended as a metaphor for the turbulent tides of Hawaiian life. But the real metaphor here is the pineapple, which in the good old gangster days was a synonym for bomb...