Word: reals
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Harvard in 1963," Wallace said. "I went out under the steam pipes, y'know. But the students there gave me a real good reception--it was some outside group that made trouble." I started to say something when he continued, "I filled the hall with thundrous applause, dija know that? That's what all the newspapers said, you go and look at them. I 'quickly converted an overwhelmingly hostile audience,' that's what they all said. You go look at them...
...actual event. Max Adrian is an ingratiating performer and a hardworking actor, and his night of Shavian lore (mostly letters and autobiographical fragments) really works. If it does not, on the other hand, make Shaw's presence a more vivid one, it is because the subject's real life was as a writer rather than a personality, a writer sufficiently great that his prose truly outshone his person. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that a portrayal will seem to diminish Shaw's stature as much as it throws light on his character...
Student criticism remains centered on the content of the lectures. "The real problem," said one junior, "is that Freidel [Frank Freidel, professor of History] devotes all his time to refuting prejudices his audience does not hold. The lecture series might better be called 'Negro Heroes I Have Known'--it consists of black equivalents of the George Washington cherry tree tale...
...FILM does not pursue this ambiguity faithfully: Nolan's professionalism is allowed to lapse into bursts of more conventional anger and passion. This is a concession to history, since the real Captain Nolan seems to have been as tempermental and irrational as his superiors, a fact which was largely responsible for the fatal Charge itself. But it is a concession which obscures the most interesting action of the story, which is the frightfully painful transition from the age of chivalry to that of total war--from Waterloo to Verdun...
Ultimately the real concern of this movie is not to tell us what the Charge of the Light Brigade meant, but simply to show us how it looked. And this, for all the cast of thousands and the vast expanses of eerie, treeless Turkish landscape, is something which Richardson doesn't really succeed in doing. Individual sequences are sometimes breathtaking--Nolan delivering the order to charge from the heights, the Brigade advancing down the valley at a slow trot, the final torrential surge of the survivors through the Russian cannon. But hovering above the whole elaborately-conceived spectacle...