Word: railroading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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JOHN GRISHAM will redefine the term "celebrity lawyer" this fall, when he returns to the courtroom after a five-year hiatus for writing blockbusters like The Client and The Chamber. The author is taking on the Illinois Central Railroad on behalf of the estate of an employee who was killed while at work. He accepted the case in 1991, just after the publication of his first best seller, The Firm...
...POINT IN DOLORES CLAIBORNE is its eponymous protagonist tied to a railroad track or strapped down in the path of a rapidly impending train or buzz saw. And a good thing too, for this adaptation of Stephen King's best seller (does he write anything else?) also lacks a hero, or indeed any remotely admirable masculine figure, eager to race to her rescue...
...Jonas it means much more. When creepy railroad tycoon J.P. Stiles (Scott Glenn) offers the towns people $50 an acre for their land, only Jonas stands up to question the shady deal. Stiles' thugs hunt him down and shoot him, but Jonas manages to pass the deed to the farm on to his son. Miserable, Daniel runs out to the family boat and cries himself to sleep. Obviously, the Hacketts are farmers and not sailors since the gentle bobbing of the boat unlaces the feebly-tied mooring rope, setting Daniel adrift down the river...
John Henry is the quintessential railroad builder. We first see him competing against a spike-driving machine. Standing on a rock above the crowd, he laughs confidently in the face of their disbelief at his prowess. Thankfully, Henry, as one of the few black popular legends, is neither a politically correct icon nor a cardboard character, drained of his ethnicity. He is one of the group, yet with his own story. When Henry talks with Daniel about father-son relationships, he speaks wistfully of his own father, sold downriver because he was a slave...
...nefarious Stiles still needs the Hackett farm in order to make his diabolical plan for a railroad complete. Although Stiles is in many ways the typical villain, he has several faces; all of them are absolutely evil. As a former hired gun, he is a twisted version of the self-made man. His current executive position and gold-lined office parallel him to the "robber barons" of the industrial age, like Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefe