Word: ratting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even law-and-order advocates sometimes find their sensibilities offended by that most unstable adjunct of police work, the informer. Trained from childhood to disparage tattletales, Americans have hardly a decent word for those who give information to authorities. The glossary runs to such pejorative nouns as fink, stoolie, rat, canary, squealer. In some police argot they are snitches. Yet no major police force can operate without some of the shady types who will go where cops seldom can, perhaps to a meeting of conspirators, or do what cops won't, for example, shoot heroin before a cautious pusher...
...Rabe has written a play on the war in Vietnam that defies a million slogans to become a contemporary masterpiece. Pavlo Hummel is an innocuous little guy from 231 East 45th Street, Manhattan, who with the beginning of his basic training is on the way to becoming "the fattest rat in the finest cheese." Lost in the big world, Pavlo has adopted army standards and has committed himself to a pathetic struggle to meet them. Fresh from his overwhelming success as the son in the Godfather, Al Pacino gives a performance that can have no equal. "You're weird, Hummel...
More likely, dearie, you'll hold down two jobs-'cause when you get home from that executive job in the sky, there ain't gonna be no unliberated woman left (and certainly no man) to do your grub work. Join the rat race without me. I'll take it like...
...impossible to tell whether the bustle is caused solely by the impending visit. Since Nixon will reach Peking only six days after the start of China's New Year, a traditional cleanup time, much of the activity is undoubtedly in honor of the Year of the Rat...
...very end, when JJ walks off carrying a little packet of white powder, he wonders--and we wonder--is it rat poison again? You hope so--there's no other way out of JJ's desperate situation, caught between crooks and cops, developed so convincingly in the second half of the film. If he doesn't get it this time he will the next...