Word: preachment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...obvious both stars saw this film as a vehicle to advocate causes they care about, but they are good-natured about it. Writer Garland and Director Pollack had the sense to give Horseman the tone of a pop fable; they stress entertainment over preachment. A romantic intensity that Fonda and Redford might have generated is lost as a result; there could have been more electricity between the electric horseman and his lady. And Willie Nelson, the great country singer, is wasted in his first acting role. Still, there is not a more cheerful or engaging movie around these days...
...would have been easy to make a routinely satisfying little thriller out of The China Syndrome, plenty of slam-bang action coupled with a little cheap preachment about atomic perils. But by keeping the polemic almost entirely implicit, by building solid central characterizations into the plot, and by framing the whole thing with quick, shrewd observations (Fonda's career-girl pad, for example, is perfectly disorganized), the movie tran scends its disaster-thriller origins −and its politics. Proponents of nuclear power are right to be concerned about this picture...
...Carl Reiner's low-keyed direction avoids some obvious errors. Once Denver begins preaching the latest word from on high, the media get interested, and there is an opportunity to make the customary comments on the circus aspects of overnight celebrity. But Reiner makes the point lightly. Heavy preachment is just not his style. The result is a movie that tugs at your arm instead of blasting in your ear. Oh, God! is a nice movie about some nice people who have been made in the image of a very nice Jehovah. - Richard Schickel
...fleeing Norway to live abroad for 27 years. Both men abandoned their native countries physically and yet were able to repossess and be possessed by them psychically and aesthetically. As a parallel to the Greek dictum "Know thyself," both Ibsen and Joyce say "Free thyself." This is no faddish preachment to "do your own thing" but a call to an austere heroism and indomitability that dares to stand alone...
...have made that era so comfortable for vice, apart from the occasional luxury, was the old double standard, the neat if uncharitable belief that some women were just bad, and no real harm in that. But high-minded ministers and pious women soon assaulted this view with the fierce preachment that everyone must be good. By the early 1920s, after two generations of struggle, the reformers had won the official prohibition of commercial sex (and liquor as well...