Word: saxonism
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...that no future leader will have to echo the worry of Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1858: "I am convinced that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, pasty-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from the loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage." Or of President Kennedy in 1960: "Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security." In a country so lately thought to be dedicated to pleasure and self-expression, that will be no small achievement...
Freemasonry, an Anglo-Saxon creation first transplanted to Florence in 1733, was soon under attack by the Catholic Church. The Masonic principles of nonsectarianism and ab stract belief in a "Great Architect of the Universe" were viewed as an intolerable threat by Pope Clement XII, who issued the first papal edict that ordered excommunication of any Catholics who became Masons. Masons were often regarded as subversive political freethinkers by the Italian principalities. By the mid-19th century, in fact, many of the most prominent nationalist leaders of the Italian risorgimento were Masons. Among them: Giuseppe Mazzini and the notoriously antipapal...
GOING TO the movies today gives one the feeling of being an unwitting contributor to a Hollywood Slice-N-Dice-a-Thon. The Saxon theater, the cheesy upstart of the Sack line, fills its lobby with horror film posters. To the left, a nubile woman is undergoing a tracheotomy by cleaver, and to the right, half-naked women cringe in terror as an ax-murderer emerges from the shadows...
Inside, the Saxon's Gothic architecture and broken seats fit well with a string of trailers slowly parading across the screen. There's good, clean, big-budget fun with The Final Conflict--hopefully, the last of the Omen pictures. The next preview heralds the return of The Texas Chain Saw Massacres, a picture ahead of its time. This trailer's teaser scene shows a raging lunatic perfecting his gasoline talents on a man in a wheelchair--straight down the middle. But that film's creator has a new surprise for us--Funhouse. Opening this week, Funhouse features a deformed killer...
Scanners, however, contains few of these tantalizing touches and much that's standardized and regressive. The Saxon theater management had the right idea after all. Scanners can be lumped together with cut-rate, ketchup-and-hamburger fare like The Texas Chainsaw Massacres and The Final Conflict because its appeal is so clearly limited by its lack of ambition...