Word: sketches
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...wife following her rape by another man. (She was named Cat Dancing--hence the title.) The film's spare plot, its classically alienated characters, and its setting in the empty Western desert all fuel the hope that it will reveal something of the inner drives of its characters, and sketch their liberation in the uncivilized freedom of a desert getaway. What can these people learn about civilization by leaving...
Saul Bellow's introductory sketch of Berryman adds a great deal to the novel. It's a rare piece, full of quaint anecdotes of their shared careers at Princeton and the University of Minnesota. Bellow knew the writer as a man first--as the man whose gruff arrogance was only a cover up for the frail alcoholic who was unable to manage his life and finally had to take refuge in hospitals. Bellow's sensitivity reaches even deeper. For he knew John Berryman the poet as well: the "Huffy Henry...wicked and away" of the Dream Songs, the narcissistic writer...
...feeling that style, for Cukor, counts for more than it is worth. Moreover, he knows it. So he compromises. He pleads sympathy for bankrupt dreams on the condition that those dreams not be indulged. And he makes a sketch-book movie of daydreams gone aglimmering...
...Second City alumni, Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber, have released an album called The Watergate Comedy Hour with a blueprint of the infamous building on the back cover. One sketch has Nixon and John Mitchell in secret conversation in a telephone booth. Says Nixon, "I knew nothing about the entire incident, and last year you told me you knew nothing about the entire incident. Now one of us is full of the old crapola...
...business lunch, or doing a full-scale snow job on a dubious journalist, Mattei was obviously an archetypal figure of our time. If The Mattei Affair is not quite as good in design and execution as it might have been, it is nevertheless an interesting and honorable attempt to sketch impressionistically the sort of complex personality the movies too often avoid. ∙ Richard Schickel