Word: point
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that is what makes Harvard-Dartmouth games, not to mention Ivy League football, so interesting. When two Ivy teams square off on the gridiron, oddsmakers run for cover. A case in point is last year when Dartmouth's lone loss came at the hands of --you guessed it--Harvard, a team that finished the season at 2-4-1 in the League...
...film begins with a simple bit of prose, beaten into the ground in grade school and forgotten after age 15--the pledge of allegiance. "The pledge of allegiance is a very big thing," Canadian-born Jewison said last week. To make this point, he recruited Lazlo Kovak--a cameraman whose strong sense of style attracted most of the critical acclaim for Woody Allen's Interiors. The voices of children in the background rise as Kovak zeroes in on a blackboard and an American flag--"and to the republic for which it stands one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty...
Another serious touch is the tenderness of Kirkland's grandfather, Sam, the guiding force in the young lawyer's life. At one point, Kirkland tells his grandfather's friend, "You know if he (Sam) goes. I don't know what I'd do." But Jewison chooses an odd route of saving us from this terrifying conclusion--he never mentions Sam again...
Kirkland's got a strong point, but it's a point he doesn't yet believe. Only after he defends a gay accused of robbing a cabbie, a man jailed for months for a missing taillight, and a stiff trial judge accused of rape and sodomy, does he realize how justice overlooks the powerful while staring down the poor...
What, indeed, is the point of all this? Why does Abe depict people as freaks and reduce their motivations to a series of mechanical and sexual impulses? If, as the author once said, this novel is "a parable of city life," then it appears that we are a society of sick helping the sick. Abe, who holds a medical degree but has never practiced, breaks all human relations down into physician-patient relationships where, as "the horse" acknowledges, "Doctors are cruel, and patients endure their cruelty...that's the law of survival." It is not an appealing view of human...