Word: ratted
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Though their playing has exquisite style, Caine and Newman merely provide teatime treats in this slice of Victorian gingerbread adapted from the classic story by Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. Director Bryan Forbes (King Rat) reveals an unexpected gift for utter nonsense, using every period cliché and corny camera trick that might imaginably be fermented into vintage black comedy. Some of the gags crumble on impact, others are stretched out like taffy, but there is enough fun left over to leave most moviegoers happily wallowing in greed, sex, homicide, body snatching and other nefarious diversions...
...savagery that gripped Hough, a garbage-strewn, rat-infested Negro section of Cleveland that is known as "Rough Hough" or simply "The Jungle," was a flagrant example of irresponsibility on the part of both Negroes and white officialdom. If ever a slum was predictably ripe for riot, it was Hough. Some 60,000 Negroes are jammed into a two-square-mile warren of squat apartment houses and decaying mansions carved up into flats; the area's crime rate is the highest in the city; flocks of prostitutes hustle passers-by at every chance; and hatred for the city...
...standing: "I'm interested in all the little movements that are divergent from the mainstream of the culture." Scherr also admits-reluctantly-that sex and radical anti-Viet Nam articles are what sell his paper. Radical is the word. Wrote a Barb columnist known only as "The Roving Rat Fink," after President Johnson's recent speech in Omaha: "Never before has an American president dared to come on so arrogant. He managed to sound much like der late Führer, who also was elected by a large majority...
Unhappily, the prohibitions are not foolproof-vixens disturbed by a low-flying plane can go berserk and murder their cubs. And sometimes the prohibitions are limited to members of the immediate tribe-rats never bite rats that belong to their own colony, but two colonies of rats have been known to meet in a pitched battle that leaves hundreds of dead on the ground. These bloodbaths, Lorenz suggests, are epidemics of mass psychosis; they serve no rat-preserving purpose that he or any other naturalist can see. In general, he concludes ominously, a species is less often annihilated...
...Odin's foreskin!, as the author says. What isn't in this belly-gutting, god-rotting typhoon of a book? In his bestselling first novel King Rat, James Clavell may have been only clearing his throat for this one, which seems every bit as long as it is. Its narrative pace is numbing, its style is deafening, its language penny dreadful. All the characters whirl like dervishes, especially Dirk Struan, a kind of Scottish superman who can borrow $5,000,000 in silver ingots from an Oriental tycoon, invent binoculars, and corner the world supply of cinchona bark...