Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first hour of the film, adolescent protagonist Alex and his gang ravage a futuristic England, rape, vandalize, and murder. They are complete scoundrels, not redeemed by mutual esteem or sympathy for the unfortunate. But they are so vital and exuberant, and Kubrick is so technically masterful that, despite one's moral abhorrence, one cannot help but sympathize. One giggles...
...tale was Rashomon in a James Bondian world, an intricate fantasy of scramblers on telephones and double identities, of 5 a.m. rendezvous in wigs and false beards, of exotic island fastnesses that pulse with secret electronics and the glint of fortunes in transit. Its protagonist could only be Howard Hughes, 67, the archetypal, anchoritic billionaire brooding over one of the world's great pools of wealth. He has always been an elusive, somehow haunted presence, sending out his commands from a bewildering entombment in desert or tropical hotels. Obsessively shy, devoted to intrigue, suspicious almost to the point of paranoia...
...works of art. Fiber-glass nudes, crouched like Playboy femlins in the Korova milk bar, serve as tables or dispense mescaline-laced milk from their nipples. They are, in fact, close parodies of the fetishistic furniture-sculpture of Allen Jones. The living room of the Cat Lady, whom Protagonist Alex (Malcolm McDowell) murders with an immense Arp-like sculpture of a phallus, is decked with the kind of garish, routinely erotic paintings that have infested Pop-art consciousness in recent years...
...comedy Any Wednesday and in the current motion picture Who Is Harry Kellerman and why is he saying those to things about me? The device is neither new nor unique to American writers; Graham Greene, the British author, used it ten years ago in describing the background of his protagonist in A Burnt-Out Case...
...Instructions of My Government, Pierre Salinger, John Kennedy's press secretary, shows himself to be a pretty good Sunday novelist in handling predictable, Drury-style missile-crisis fiction. His troubled protagonist is Sam Hood, U.S. Ambassador to Santa Clara, an Andean republic lying in some spectral dimension between Peru and Bolivia (at the bottom of Lake Titicaca, perhaps). Hood is a seasoned though disillusioned diplomat from J.F.K.'s Alliance for Progress days who disagrees with his new President's policies but must obey orders. When Santa Claran rebels secure a mountaintop where their Chinese supporters intend...