Word: relief
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...unable to heed their hearts' urgings. Woo's eloquent rendition of "The Miller's Son," a defense of her free and easy lifestyle and a prayer for future stability, is her only moment in the spotlight. But the energy and excitement she brings to this number throw into relief the relative absence of those qualities from the rest of the show...
...mounting concern about the additional pressure that illegal immigrants are putting on already overburdened social services and facilities. For the most part, illegals avoid welfare since they come to the U.S. to work. But increasingly, as they bring their families along with them, the newcomers are taking advantage of relief programs, which are all too easy to apply for. In 1975, 370 of the 21,039 il legal aliens who were apprehended in New York City were discovered to have received $500,000 in welfare payments, although they owned $1.4 million in assets. Aliens manage to get on the rolls...
...credit, Altman has found a realistic landscape, the Southern California desert, that is also a very persuasive analogue to a dream landscape-essentially empty, so that it throws its few symbolic structures into high relief. And the film's three title characters have the air of dream works about them. Tantalizingly, even hilariously real some of the time in speech and manner, they yet manage to drift away, eluding the grasp of understanding...
...later, Jed milks his memory for fragments of meaning. The narrative proceeds chronologically, skimming rapidly over Jed's academic career, slowing down to capture the degeneration of his love affair, and focusing finally and most persistently on his moments of existential angst. Jed's own formlessness is thrown into relief by his encounters with a cluster of well-drawn minor figures, from the cheerfully mundane Cudworths, whose very name suggests the unquestioning content of cattle, to the impeccable Mrs. Jones-Talbot, for whom the study of Dante is a ritual of appreciation for a lost Italian lover...
...interior of a railway car. All of which does not detract from the film's credentials as a bona fide Hitchcock. In fact, viewers who encounter difficulties with the implicit morbidity and amorality that mark some of the Master's works will find this glib comedy-thriller a welcome relief. Dame May Whitty plays the title role of the innocuous old lady-spy whose disappearance aboard a train furnishes the central event of the narrative. Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood make for a formidable pair of amateur sleuths. And there's a good old-fashioned stab at the Fascist bugaboos...