Word: noir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since 1972, the vineyards have been attracting baby boomers with the so- called blush wines. Made from such red grapes as Zinfandel or Pinot Noir, this wine is kept a pale salmon-pink by removing the skins, pulp and seeds from the juice before they darken the liquid. The result: a wine that tastes like a white and lacks the flowery bouquet of a rose. The Wine Growers of California are negotiating with Julia Child to tout their vintages on TV ads come September. Says William Young, western division president of D'Arcy MacManus Masius, the Wine Growers' advertising firm...
DIED. Edmond O'Brien, 69, stocky, heavy-jowled, Academy Award-winning actor who played tough guys in such film noir classics as The Killers (1946), A Double Life (1948) and D.O.A. (1950), and who later had memorable character roles in Seven Days in May (1964) and The Wild Bunch (1969); of Alzheimer's disease; in Inglewood, Calif. He won an Oscar as best supporting actor for his portrayal of a sycophantic Hollywood press agent in 1954's The Barefoot Contessa...
DIED. Henry Hathaway, 86, reliable Hollywood action-movie director who learned the trade from prop boy up and from 1932 crafted more than 60 rousing adventures, big-sky westerns and film noir mysteries that starred some of the screen's greatest names, including Gary Cooper (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1935), James Stewart (Call Northside 777, 1948), Tyrone Power (The Black Rose, 1950), James Mason (The Desert Fox, 1951) and John Wayne (True Grit, 1969); in Los Angeles...
...this time. Blood Simple (the title comes from Dashiell Hammett) works terse, elegant variations on a theme as old as the Fall; it subverts the film noir genre in order to revitalize it; it offers the satisfactions and surprises of a conniving visual style. Most important, it displays the whirligig wit of two young men--Joel Coen, 30, a graduate of New York University film school, and his brother Ethan, 27--in a debut film as scarifyingly assured as any since Orson Welles was just this wide...
Here is film noir stripped down to its basics--a road, a bar, a motel, an affair, a private eye, a murder, a pinwheeling series of betrayals--then customized with camera style. Strapped to a car fender, or sauntering at ankle level through a rowdy party, or tracking smoothly down a long bar counter (and over a passed-out customer), the Coens' camera is a participant in the action, and worlds hipper than anyone on-screen. "Hi, I'm here," it as much as says, "and I'm soooo smart." It is too; it creates elegant riddles of space...