Word: sadists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ruggero Raimondi's Don is a middle-aged, thin-lipped, white-faced sadist, a man more easily pictured flogging cats than seducing women. Raimondi fits in well with Losey's class-conscious interpretation of Da Ponte's text--he sees Don Giovanni as the consummate self-indulgent aristocrat. There's nothing wrong with coloring the opera this way, but Raimondi and Losey paint over and obliterate the other half of Don Giovanni's character, the youthful embodiment of unbounded energy who mesmerized the romantics. They do Mozart and Da Ponte an injustice by simplifying the libretto's psychological tangle...
Harvard Crew, however, isn't all professional discipline, "eight masochists and a sadist cox." Some highlights of the year have little to do with winning a race. After a particularly hard day, the "funnelator" makes its appearance on the Charles; with devastating accuracy, water balloons are launched by the giant, 15-foot slingshot against passing B.U., Northeastern and Radcliffe crews. In June training camp, the crew also exchanges funnelator sorties with the freshmen, and bombards the Yale crews rowing 200 yards away on New London's Thames River...
Marvin Molar, who walks on his hands and can balance on a finger; Herman Mack, who eats an entire car; Joe Lon Mackey, a homicidal sadist. This gallery of grotesques could only have been invented by Harry Crews, a Southern gothic novelist who often makes William Faulkner look pastoral by comparison...
...such moments, Levanter resembles Guy Grand, the cartoon millionaire-sadist in Terry Southern's The Magic Christian-a similarity that does no credit to Kosinski. But Levanter is not content merely to engineer or observe acts of humiliation. He is also an avenging angel. At an Alpine ski resort he blows up the vacationing henchman who tortures the subjects of a Middle East potentate. He devises an excruciating end for a New York hotel clerk who betrays visiting Eastern European guests to their native apparatchiks. This deed over, Levanter privately gloats because authorities cannot discover a plot linking killer...
...bomb explodes in Israel, a wealthy Frenchman shoots out his brains in Paris, a priest gets shot in New Jersey. The only connection is blood: Sorcerer is less a movie than a bloodthirsty sadist's splicing of Technicolor newsreels. Even when the story--such as it is--gets going, the movie sidetracks for occasional carnage when it can't salvage enough from the plot itself. ("Maybe it's time," we imagine the director saying, "for a heavy cement pipe to crush a few native workers...