Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...movie is based on biographical material compiled by John and Alan Lomax, who were doing folk-music research for the Library of Congress in the 1930s. Leadbelly is at some considerable pains to get its protagonist off the hook. Imprisoned twice on separate murder charges, Ledbetter sang and reminisced for the Lomaxes. Later he had little good to say about the way John Lomax set his story down. "He did not write nothing like I told him," the subject complained-although there remains a better than fair chance that these were the second thoughts of an ex-con embarrassed...
...from Amarcord, last year's lyrical reminiscence that won Fellini his fourth Academy Award. The new movie is peopled by many of the androgynous grotesques that crowded his fantasy Satyricon (1969). Fellini, 56, has ensured his film a stormy reception in Italy by comparing the 18th century rake-protagonist to the typical modern Italian: "He is all shop front, a public figure striking attitudes ... in short, a braggart Fascist...
...immigrants' struggle to retain their identity in the midst of a strange culture from the beginning. The children of the American dispersion are not the products of the new Jewish vision of individuality as Howe suggests, but of the old American vision of homogeneity. America is the true protagonist in this, and indeed any immigrant account, working to break barriers and make everyone seem the same. The implicit point, which Howe fails to make, is not that the Jews chose wrongly when they accepted the American vision of success, it is that there was never any choice...
...January 1972, just a year after All in the Family made its debut, Lear produced Sanford and Son, his first black sitcom, and watched it soar into the top ten rated shows. It was followed that September by Maude, a spin-off from Family, whose mercurial, politically liberal protagonist taught a nation's housewives the imprecation: "God'll getcha for this." Then came two more socially stratified black sitcoms: Good Times, wherein J.J. and his ghetto clan give a new meaning-and pronunciation-to dynamite, and the middle-class Jeffersons, which demonstrates weekly that blacks also...
...protagonist of Man Friday is still Crusoe, but he is no longer the hero. It is the intention of the film makers to ridicule Crusoe's 18th century notions of the civilizing ideals which, Scenarist Mitchell implies, persist into and continually plague the 20th. Accordingly, this Friday comes from a very hip tribe. He laughs openly at Crusoe's attempts to instill the principles of wage-earning and sporting competition and figures Christianity to be foolish but harmless. Crusoe is soon turned into a pratfall personification of Western man. When an opportunity to escape the island arrives...