Word: rudderlessness
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That's the Spirit (Universal) climbs likably if loutishly aboard one of the only two "trends" discernible in rudderless current movies. Like Wonder Man and Where Do We Go From Here?, it is a comic fantasy. (The other trend, well represented by Conflict-see above-is crime melodrama with Freudian parsley...
Deprived of his bitter social implications, the Ape bums and blasts his way through a rudderless melodrama. Deprived of his ferocious eloquence, thanks doubtless to censorship, he talks like a tough guy who is trying not to shock his grandmother. Deprived of his tragic ending, he becomes, in retrospect, a not very convincing sailor ashore. Unfortunately, his screen creators have tried to compensate for these deficiencies by making him funny...
...when Repeal killed the 18th Amendment, Manhattan theatre critics made an almost unanimous critical suggestion. They suggested that Tobacco Road be relegated to Cain's warehouse, morgue of plays that die aborning. Reviewers wrote off the play's characters as scum, the play itself as "clumsy, rudderless, callow, repulsive...
...boat came out of the British-owned Bahamas last week. On the beach near Mayari, Cuba, startled fishermen looked up from their work to see a motor launch, propelled by a sail pieced out of dirty shirts and trousers, ground itself in the shallow-water. Out of the rudderless boat tumbled five Americans, nine British West Indian Negroes. Wolfing food and water, the first they had seen in four blistering clays, the tattered survivors gasped out a story of riot, rebellion on Great Inagua,* southernmost of the Bahamas, 50 miles from the Cuban coast...
over a sandbar near North Truro which stove in her hull but did not hold her fast. Rudderless, slowly filling, "she drifted a dreary wreck," while her crew of 27 fishermen fought to get her to port...