Word: neighborhood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Rocky is a slum fairy tale, its plot simple even by Hollywood standards. A broken-down neighborhood fighter, who boxes, "because I can't sing or dance," is picked as a last-minute replacement to fight the heavyweight champion of the world, mainly because the champ sees the promotional possibilities of the hero's monicker: "the Italian Stallion." The hero produces a rousing fight and, of course, finds love. The movie is fun- ny, unpretentious and relentlessly upbeat, sort of what Mean Streets would have been if Frank Capra had made it. Its only message-endure, reach your...
...turns and blind alleys, the thriller. As in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, to which The Family Arsenal seems to invite comparison, the characters emerge at first as anonymous voices: a crook prowling a seedy riverside district; an accountant who refuses to yield his house to a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood, an aristocratic woman who collects people like souvenirs. But, as the characters are unmasked with the gradually unwinding plot, each one's terror and terrorizing begins to look and sound more and more alike. Slowly, as in The Wasteland, the story dances itself into a nightmare at every corner where...
...like the characters in a play, Theroux's people are most moving when they see most clearly that dead end which is merely a line on the map. For Lady Arrow, the revelation slips in for only a second when her idyllic picture of Hood's quaintly shabby neighborhood is shattered by the dusty characterlessness of the place. For Gawber, the perception of the true nature of modern decline is more annihilating than his imagined House-of-Usher-like holocausts could ever be. Catastrophe, Gawber realizes, is not "fancy's need for theater...
JOSEPH MATTINA, New York state supreme court justice: I grew up in an Italian neighborhood and my father was a shoemaker. My parents were born in Sicily and they could not speak English so I went to school speaking Italian. I flunked kindergarten-the only thing I flunked in my academic career. It was something that stuck in my mind. When I went to high school, suddenly the separateness was very apparent. There were not too many Italians. You could not get into the clubs or the fraternities. There was an Irish Catholic church, and there was a certain amount...
...hard times, but we had books in the house. Like many women who don't conform, I didn't have brothers, so it is possible some of the dreams of the family were inadvertently invested in me. Show business was a pass ticket out of our neighborhood, so we all dreamed of being Teresa Brewer, who had made it. I did go to college. Then my father sent me an ad from a Las Vegas club for chorus girls. You had to be at least 5 ft. 7 and have a Phi Beta Kappa key [the group...