Word: sheering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Riding on a lot of contacts, a line of credit and sheer gall, a troupe of about 300 international profiteers have become the principal beneficiaries of the galloping oil price increases that occur daily on the "spot market." They are the mysterious players in a loose old-boy network of private investors, former oil executives, foreign government officials, Arab sheiks and assorted middlemen, brokers and hustlers. "Many of them," says Joe Roeber, a London-based analyst of the spot market, "got out of trading used tires or razor blades or whatever else they were doing to start dealing...
...station attendant (Beau Bridges), a man with few brains but good, patient instincts. The problem lies in story development. There is something dreadfully predictable about the way the tale moves. When Norma Rae finally causes all the machines in the mill to be stopped through the sheer force of her belief in justice, our response is to wonder why it took so long for the film makers to reach this big scene. It is the same with other sequences: company goons on the attack, the death of Norma Rae's father from overwork. There is an awful familiarity here...
...economically valuable, needed for their labor, today they are a painfully expensive proposition (according to one estimate, the average middle-class family spends $100,000 to raise a child); 2) Children are no longer considered a necessary and inevitable part of marriage; and 3) For reasons of feminism and/or sheer economic need, more women than ever before are working. In fact, of those women who do have children, more than half have jobs outside the home. These developments have produced a very complicated series of readjustments, the social machine fine-tuning itself in hundreds of subtle ways...
...that sum up the pathos of fetishism-the substitution of a symbolic part for the desired whole-more acutely than In Memoriam Mack Sennett, 1936, in which a woman's negligee, hanging on its own in a closet, has developed a forlornly luminous pair of breasts. And for sheer panic, one need go no further than Magritte's Hunters at the Night's Edge, 1928, with its two stocky, armed and booted he-men writhing in apprehension at the sight of an empty horizon. We see their fear but not what they are afraid...
Unfortunately, sheer visual zip is not enough to carry the film; it drags from one scuffle to the next. Deborah Van Valkenburgh, as the love interest of the Warriors' War Chief (Michael Beck), provides a few libidinous moments; a lesbian disco dance scene has its peculiar charms. But The Warriors is not lively enough to be cheap fun or thoughtful enough to be serious. Walter Hill, the talented director of Hard Times, the 1975 boxing movie, badly needs a direction to his career...