Word: mythic
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...indicted under the Smith Act on charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. He jumped bail and fled to Mexico, was captured in a border motel, and spent several years in a maximum security cell at Leavenworth, right beside Machine Gun Kelly. Such exploits built a mythic aura around Hall, who, two years after his release in 1957, became general secretary of a party in turmoil. Gone were the halcyon days of 1932 when a communist candidate for President garnered 102,000 votes. Between McCarthy's witch-hunts and Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin...
...MYTHIC PRESENCE...
...suave and gentlemanly. Brando, who grew up middle class, Midwestern and Wasp, radiated pure working-class alienation -- an inarticulate promise of danger, sex and social abrasion. Which is why, as TIME film critic Richard Schickel tells us in BRANDO: A LIFE IN OUR TIMES (Atheneum; $21.95), he was a mythic presence for all the young urban professionals of the '50s. Rude but sensitive, rough but anguished, Brando was their version of pastoral -- a noble-savage counterpoint to the corporate rat race. The myth got lost in the series of unsuccessful movies he made after his greatest, On the Waterfront. Schickel...
...Robin Hood films are, of course, not about a Norman-Saxon feud or the equitable redistribution of goods. They are about star quality. The mythic Robin Hood is a figure of strength, grace, wit and humanity. He radiates moral self-confidence. He is a fellow's best friend and a woman's dream lover. He personifies what in simpler times was called masculinity. No wonder the role lured some of the cinema's top exemplars of derring-do. Douglas Fairbanks (1922), Errol Flynn (1938) and Sean Connery (1976) made memorable glosses on the English lord -- and no matter that...
Though it takes for its subject one of jazz's great tragic figures, Yesterdays is not concerned with scaling the heights of Holiday's mythic stature, nor with undoing it. Rather, it engages its audience in discovering Holliday's life through her own music and that of others. Like a great jazz composition, Yesterdays hovers about its theme without suffocating it, evades static and predetermined theatrical structures, defies classification and resists resolution...