Word: nadir
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...name means "beautiful," but its history has been hard and ugly. The mountainous island of Formosa was devastated by 50 years of Japanese occupation, and it fared little better under the Chinese after they regained control in 1945. Its nadir came in 1950 when Chiang Kai-shek landed on the island with 500,000 beaten soldiers and 2,000,000 refugees from the Communist mainland, straining the unhappy country to the breaking point...
...town, where they swap girls, drugs and stolen motorcycle parts with equal abandon. In between drug-induced stupors, the Angels go on motorcycle-stealing forays, even have a panel truck with a special ramp for loading the stolen machines. Afterward, they may ride off again to seek some new nadir in sordid behavior...
...rage or tears; he delighted in mischief and rushed headlong into many an action that he was later to regret. If he was an Elizabethan in deed and spirit, he was implacably Victorian in his ideals and dedi cation to duty. When he became Prime Minister at the nadir of his nation's fortunes in 1940, he was 65-older than any other Allied or enemy leader. He had held more Cabinet posts than any other Briton in history; he had seen more of war than any of his military advisers; and from a lifetime of scholarship, authorship...
...fault is important but not dominant. Williams can horselaugh as well as harrumph, and it's an absolute delight to watch the most perverse of playwrights tell a tale in which the nadir of naughtiness is attained by a man with a harmless though peculiar passion for ladies' underwear. Huston, what's more keeps Iguana scuttling along at a right smart rate, and as always he shrewdly challenges his actors with delegated creativity. They all respond. Kerr lends charm and finesse to a meaching masochist. As for Burton, he makes more sense in this movie than...
...humorless efficiency of a professional demolition crew. Cutting from incident to incident, car to car, ground to air, the film dissipates its fun at every turn, and the only chase to build up steam is a Chase named Barrie, who dances a wicked deadpan twist. Mad World reaches its nadir with an abortive climax that puts Spencer Tracy and ten comedians atop a fire ladder reeling several stories above the street, presumably on the assumption that eleven men suspended in mid-air will be eleven times funnier than Harold Lloyd used to be. Alas, the law of diminishing returns prevails...