Word: protagonist
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When he says this to his rich girlfriend by her parents' Long Island swimming pool, Claude has already come a long way from humble beginnings. Conroy's novel first shows the protagonist as a young boy in the early 1940s spending long hours alone in a basement apartment near Manhattan's Third Avenue El while his mother, the rawboned, boilermaker-swigging Emma, drives a cab. Fortunately for Claude, the cramped living quarters contains an old 66- key nightclub piano, a memento from Emma's past life on the vaudeville circuit. The boy begins plinking away and eventually seeks advice from...
...best measure of this movie's merits is that the cross-reference that springs most readily to mind is another well-made current movie. But everyone knows The Fugitive derives its title, protagonist and basic situation from the 1960s television series in which David Janssen, as the luckless Kimble, was pursued across many years and many states by Barry Morse's implacable detective. It was Les Miserables in prime time, and that overtone is lost in this adaptation, which compresses the pursuit and confines it mostly to Chicago. But the tension and realism that result from permitting Kimble less running...
Thirty years ago, at the opening of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the protagonist, Leamas, was defined as a person who could not quite pass for a London clubman, a "man who was not quite a gentleman." Now, early in his new book, we are told that John le Carre's latest alienated loner, Jonathan Pine, though taken for a gentleman, did not in fact go to "that kind of school." A pungent reminder that the real wars Le Carre has been chronicling -- the class war in Britain, and the civil (very civil) war between one side...
...novelist's protagonist, however, is a fundraiser for the class's Harvard reunion. That is somehow fitting in a class that is remarkably good at raising money...
...assaults, his live-TV walkout) preceded the indignities imposed by the network bosses (his closest CBS colleagues purged, his story ideas slighted). But the scenario is still Chayefskian, and now there's a real-life Network II: in a goose-the-ratings gambit, the bosses oblige the battered, brave protagonist (Rather) to accept a hustling, not exactly cerebral woman (Connie Chung) as his co-anchor...