Word: primal
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...Primal Gloom. He can drink almost anyone under the table too. When Burton's emotional life was particularly eruptive one day earlier this month, he drank half a gallon of cognac, being careful not to let it interfere with his work before the cameras in a new picture called The VIPs. His heroes are Scofield, Olivier, Gielgud, Alec Guinness?and a Lancastrian he once met who could down twelve pints of beer while Big Ben was announcing midnight. "I am one of the few people I know," says Burton, "who drinks only when he works." And this is true. Between...
Only Sprocket Holes. Stevens made Shane, too. deliberately including every major cliche of the oater: cattlemen v. sodbusters, gunfighters out of nowhere, a funeral, a Fourth of July party. Stevens found under each cliche its root truth as a primal element of life on the range, turning what could have been a routine buttermilker into one of the greatest westerns ever told...
...delight in his new finery. Swifter than thought, the mood changes, and the robes seem transformed into the priestly vestments of a man taking holy orders. Later, raising his slight, shattered body from the floor after sexual violation, Mills utters a howl which in its compressed agony echoes the primal curse of man. Robbed of all self-regard, his face whitens to despair as if it were daubed in the ashes of a cremated soul...
...save Simon (Renato Salvatori) from the dishonorable ways he has fallen into. The tragic situation is provoked by the love affair of Rocco and Nadia (Annie Girardot), a prostitute whom Simon had loved and lost. When Simon learns of Rocco's success, he drives himself to re-enact the primal crime, raping Nadia in Rocco's presence, beating his brother, and eventually killing the woman who can but tell him, "You dirtied the only beautiful thing in my life." Rocco forgives his brother yet again, and the film ends with his saying "We must help him, not judge...
...bottles. The Mensa chapter from Leeds spent a recent weekend cooking and camping out in the Lake Country. But true to the spirit of Mensa, the outing took the form of a conference; and the theme, as their notice expressed it, "will be appropriate to the more or less primal scene in which it is staged: Is our local civilization making life too complicated and artificial and what, of anything, ought or can we do about it." I am left wondering what Wordsworth could have thought of all this...