Word: shocker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Jones's racial shocker that slams through the spectator like a jolt from the third rail...
Dutchman is a racial shocker that slams through the spectator like a volt jolt from the third rail. Adapted for $60,000 from LeRoi Jones's one-act play, the film describes in 55 minutes the brutal brief encounter between a black man and a white woman who meet in a subway car somewhere under Manhattan. The man (Al Freeman Jr.) looks like a young intellectual; the woman (Shirley Knight) acts like a maniac in a miniskirt. Smiling and snarling, she flops down beside him and slides her thigh against his thigh. When he stammers, she strokes his lips...
...tirade against white wickedness, Dutchman makes no more sense than any other noisy blurb for black reaction. But as a dramatic shocker, it hits even harder on the screen than it did on the stage. The camera picks the onlooker up, sits him down hard only two seats away from that subway succubus, and then forces him to sit there with his palms sweating while the danger builds and builds and builds like the brain-stabbing squeal of steel wheels in a turning tunnel...
...past three months, Metropolitan Opera audiences have seen more exploding galleons, clashing armies and airborne tenors than they did in the thousand-and-one nights at the old house. Last week the Met staged its new production of Lohengrin, and it, too, was a shocker-not for spectacle, but for lack of it. The stage was virtually stripped clean of scenery. Choristers stood in rigid rows like drill teams awaiting inspection; principal singers stirred hardly at all, and when they did, it was with the slow, deliberate movements of dream figures. The audience loved it, loudly bravoed Conductor Karl...
...Swedish film 491 is a sardonic shocker that takes its title from Christ's commandment to forgive sinners "until seventy times seven," or 490 times (Matthew 18:21-22). Apparently suggesting the unforgivable 491st sin, the film depicts a Swedish sociological experiment in which a young bachelor named Krister (connoting Christ) shelters six juvenile delinquents who proceed to wreck his home, sell his furniture, maim themselves, cavort with a prostitute and force her to have inter course with a dog. Assorted scenes evoke other perversions from sodomy to fellatio; the picture ends with Krister's arrest...