Word: scabrous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gideon's estranged wife and current lover (played by the quicksilver dancers Leland Palmer and Ann Reinking) are virtually undisguised portraits of Gwen Verdon and the real-life Reinking. The hero's artistic associates are scabrous caricatures of past Fosse collaborators. Through a series of gritty backstage scenes and razor-sharp dance numbers, these players dramatize all the tensions, hard work and neuroses of idiosyncratic, inveterate show people. In Jazz's spectacular opening sequence, a Broadway audition, Fosse even creates his own capsule version of A Chorus Line...
Like Badlands, Director Terrence Malick's remarkable first film, his new work is a bleak and unstinting attack on America's materialistic culture. But Malick is an artist, not a polemicist; his scabrous ideas are expressed in the elegiac terms of a fable. In Days of Heaven he tells of a migrant worker, Bill (Richard Gere), who travels from Chicago with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his kid sister Linda (Linda Manz) to harvest wheat for an aristocratic Texas farmer (Playwright Sam Shepard). Tired of "nosing around like a pig" and infuriated by his employer...
...kids who came of age in the late '60's; at its worst Animal House revels in abject silliness. The hilarious highs easily compensate for the puerile lows. A few dumb gags about ROTC thugs and big breasts do not detract from the film's scabrous assaults on undergraduate caste systems, sanctimonious preppies and liberal pieties. Besides, how can one fail to like a campus film that kills off one of the coeds in a kiln explosion...
...bungled suicide attempts; The End's second half bogs down describing an unfunny friendship between Sonny and a clownish schizo (a mugging Dom DeLuise) whom he meets at a nuthouse. The film's characters and intentions are blurred and trivialized. What should have been a scabrous black comedy in the manner of Carl Reiner's Where's Poppa? devolves into a pointless, centrifugal cartoon...
...will put in investment funds. Construction companies will erect buildings; transport companies will bid for mass transit; energy, environmental control and waste recycling firms will all have roles, and much of the work will be parceled out to small business. The object is not only to raze and remake scabrous neighborhoods, but also to create private jobs, help small entrepreneurs and, not incidentally, to make money...