Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this all-American paragon, oozing the sap of maple-sugared kindness? When ABC aired the Howard Hughes story, a made-for-TV film biography of the reclusive millionaire, the protagonist was unrecognizable. When, for instance, Lana Turner anticipated marrying him, she had all her sheets monogrammed HH; Hughes turned her down with "marry Huntington Hartford." A more sinister Hughes emerged from Film Maker Ron Lyon's experience. He had reckoned without his subject. When Lyon tried to obtain newsreel clips of Hughes, the only ones available were of him smiling and waving. Then the insurance company, doubtless aware...
...Albert says, none of them are truly "spontaneous" in the sense that structure is never left to chance. There is a well-conceived skeleton within nearly every show bit, which any kind of good theatrical or literary comedy naturally demands. Usually, this framework involves such plot structures as protagonist versus antagonist in a jealous conflict over lovers, mixed identities, transferred allegiances, tragic irony, and a variety of double plots. In the musical comedy parody (after Rogers and Hammerstein) of the finale, for example, the first scene introduces the all American boy and girl who proceed in subsequent vignettes...
...unsuccessful fictions. Like most failed novelists, Fabré is bitter. He sits in a cafė all day, his crippled foot hidden under the table, nursing along a grenadine and milk ("with a drop of cassis") and trying to live vicariously through Nicholas. Indeed, he transforms Nicholas into the protagonist of a novel that is lived, not written. He tells him what to do, where to go, how to talk, whom to pursue, when to woo. Soon after quitting his humble job to follow Fabré's precepts, Nicholas becomes wildly, improbably successful. He also becomes a vicious, amoral...
...occupation during World War II. Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien (TIME, Oct. 14) is the most prominent among them: a steady, serious film, and vastly better than Les Violons du Bal. Both movies are about the humiliation and extermination of Jews, related through the experiences of a youthful protagonist. But all that was thoughtful in Malle's movie becomes smarmy in Les Violons du Bal-politics crushed into pastels for a Sunday painter's palette...
...this film, made from his most popular novel, Hesse takes a fearful pummeling at the hands of one Fred Haines, who visited similar punishment on James Joyce in his screenplay for Ulysses (1967). The protagonist of Steppenwolf, the book's readers will recall, is Harry Haller, a writer enraptured with despair. He plans suicide, if only he can work himself up to it. He is also schizoid: he sees himself as both a bourgeois and a fierce maverick, a prowling, implacable wolf of the steppes. An encounter with a beautiful young woman of mystery, Hermine (Dominique Sanda), brings...