Word: protagonist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Director Bernardo Bertolucci, 30, the prodigy of Italian cinema who made an impressive American debut seven years ago with his Before the Revolution, has added a lot of panache to Moravia's book but lost much of its psychological strength. Marcello (lean-Louis Trintignant), the film's protagonist, is a rigidly "normal" young man who marries and joins the Fascists for the same reason-to conform. His passion for convention is the ill-fitting mask he wears to cover his own moral corruption. While he was a young boy, he was the victim of an attempted seduction...
...Point Blank defines some surreal and chilling points about the savagery of contemporary urban life, the mayhem in Get Carter is a gruesome and almost pornographic visual obsession. Fledgling DirectorMike Hodges clearly hoped to put together a jazzy paean to the classic detective story; the film's protagonist, in fact, is shown in a couple of scenes poring over a copy of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. But Hodges seems to have learned more from Mickey Spillane...
Carter, like Spillane's Mike Hammer, is a homicidal knave, and in dealing with him the film takes on the very qualities it is trying to portray. It wallows in its ceaseless bloodbath and emerges like its protagonist - sleazy and second-rate...
...extremely entertaining, very funny, but not frivolous. The plot is not overwhelmingly brilliant, merely an opportunity for Buechner to exercise his talent at describing and delineating characters. Throughout the book, he uses that talent to best effect, never descending to cheapness to make a point. His description of his protagonist's first act of exhibitionism is the most lyrical periphrasis of a grisly subject I have ever seen, a masterpiece of style and taste...
...time: 1974, ". . . a decade before 1984." The protagonist seems to be just another middle-aged paid assassin. His contract is with three university professors. The plot: to blow up the Peace Train scheduled to pass through a university town two weeks hence, carrying "the man," along with the usual entourage of Government brass, Secret Service men and reporters...