Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fanatic flaw in Arnolphe, the protagonist of Wives, is that he is a wildly jealous man with a horrible fear of being cuckolded. Arnolphe (Brian Bedford) has had his intended wife Agnes (Joan Van Ark) posted to a convent from childhood, and now keeps her isolated from society in a town house guarded by two watchful servants. Arnolphe's master plan has been to keep Agnes innocent in body, and blank of mind. A young gallant wrecks the plan. Horace (David Dukes) catches sight of Agnes, falls in love with her, trysts with her and eventually wins...
...grace and clarity. At times the fog of Gallic intrigue grows almost too thick for any but the most attentive reader. But it is a tribute to the author's skill that despite the staggering ruck of events and the gulf of years that separates us from his protagonist. Louis comes through not as a monster but a comprehensible human being, fleetingly attractive and always impressive. If he sometimes resembles a Mafia Don organizing Newark, fair enough. Louis XI didn't want love, he wanted power...
...Sunday suppers for the American colony (as does Jones), and his apartment becomes a kind of command post from which expatriates uneasily sally forth to see the carnage between the kids and De Gaulle's cops. On Jones' track record one might expect Harry to be hero-protagonist. Instead, the book produces Jonathan James Hartley III, a creaky, equivocal observer-narrator who could easily have been borrowed (in intent if not execution) from Henry James or Glenway Wescott...
...English at their pleasures," observes an Irish Liverpudlian in The Reckoning. Sorrier still it is to see the dislocated Hibernians at theirs. For the ancients, there is the public house where they undergo the peculiar process Yeats called "withering into truth." For the film's protagonist, Michael Marler (Nicol Williamson), there is London pyramid climbing-ascending corporate strata by using the bow-and-scrape to superiors and the knee-in-groin against competitors...
Part victim, part protagonist, Didman drinks and fornicates his way through perversely comic and dreadful, nightmarish scenes, drifting toward a vision of his final destiny: he must become a self-willed pawn of the black-power movement. "Generals, politicians, princes_they killed in quest of power" he maunders to himself. "Why shouldn't an editor? Why shouldn't a middle-class family...