Word: moralisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with the camera leisurely examining the narrator's estate (the "Providence" of the title), and then cutting to a hand dropping a wine glass. Hands, cut off from the bodies they are supposed to serve, recur repeatedly in the film, symbols of creation and destruction, of free action and moral responsibility. The first two-thirds of Providenceis shot through a blue filter, evocative of the dark world of the unconscious, which is also the locale of Langham's latest novel. Here, characters wrestling with their inadequacies starkly confront the twin problems of living and dying. Gielgud is himself dying...
...other people's imaginings. Her husband--"a sanctimonious sod," his father calls him--is a model of self-control, afraid of violence "because it reeks of spontaneity," of himself because his own urges to violence must be so vigorously suppressed. He is also the self-conscious seeker of "a moral language" to set against his father's passionate self-indulgence. Dissatisfied with his son's marriage to Sonia, Langham obliges her to pursue Kevin Woodford (David Warner), the defendant in the trial sequence, and couples his son with a mistress (Elaine Stritch) who bears a suspicious resemblance to Claude...
...reunite for an outdoor dinner in this picture-postcard setting. When they arrive, they are hardly what we have anticipated. Burstyn and Bogarde are happily married, and Warner, now clearly identified as Gielgud's bastard son, is on good terms with them both. Bogarde remains a seeker after moral language, but the hatred he supposedly bears his father as a result of his mother's death looms largely as a projection of Gielgud's own moral discomfort. "I don't blame you," Bogarde says to his father in reference to the suicide...
President Carter told a nationwide television audience last night that dealing with the nation's energy crisis requires a collective effort that is "the moral equivalent...
...they ask, if by accident or design, one variety of re-engineered E. coli proved dangerous? By escaping from the lab and multiplying, their scenario goes, it could find its way into human intestines and cause baffling diseases. Beyond any immediate danger, others say, there are vast unknowns and moral implications. Do not intervene in evolution, they warn in effect, because "it's not nice to fool Mother Nature." Caltech's biology chairman, Robert Sinsheimer, concludes: "Biologists have become, without wanting it, the custodians of great and terrible power. It is idle to pretend otherwise...