Word: ryder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Peacock Party (Viking; $7.95), by Alan Aldridge with Harry Willock and George E. Ryder, is the season's most demanding work. The rhymes vary from one-syllable words to items like apogee and collation-an invitation to learning, but also to mystification. The illustrations are something else: portraits of the animal kingdom as seen by the surrealist eye and rendered by the quattrocento hand. Long after the Peacock poetry is memorized or forgotten, the pictures will detonate in the mind, like the bizarre conceits of John Tenniel for the Alice books...
WHEN YOU COMIN' BACK, RED RYDER...
When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder is an orgy for masochists. For two hours the audience is trapped with a collection of loathsome people who take turns showering one another with verbal and physical abuse. It would be nice to say that there is some brilliant point to the repulsive goings-on, but none ever presents itself...
Milton Katselas' direction of Red Ryder does not serve Medoff well. As anyone who saw Katselas' Report to the Commissioner knows, he likes to let actors chew up the scenery. Gortner's portrayal of Teddy is as overblown as Michael Moriarty's star turn in Commissioner, he is such a bundle of stylized theatrical tics that Teddy's unpleasantness never becomes psychologically interesting. He is just a shrieking, obnoxious madman, an unintentional Mad magazine parody of Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon...
...characters except Gortner's are themselves cliches; the unsatisfied wife, the frustrated greaser, the fat waitress, the nice-guy motel-keeper. The characters line up almost exactly like those in The Petrified Forest, but in that film they were three-dimensional. In Red Ryder the characters are all foils for Teddy's contempt. None of them are allowed to do anything but whimper or get hysterical. When Red Ryder finally goes after Teddy and shoots him down, the film has already lost us. The final act of bravery, unlike Leslie Howard's in Petrified Forest, makes little impact, because...