Word: soule
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...love opens as the central character, Joe Pendleton (Beatty), a star quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams, looks as though he is about to suffer a tragic death in a tunnel collision between his bicycle and a truck. A novice heavenly escort, (played by Buck Henry) removes Joe's soul from his body just before the smash-up in order to spare Joe the pain. Of course, the escort does not realize that Joe, being an excellent athlete with quick reflexes, would have avoided the crash and lived for another 50 years. Joe protests his early departure to heaven...
...under his California rock, you could, hoe him right back under again with a few well-chosen comments about the world's most powerful un-indicated co-conspirator, and all that. It was all good clean fun, with a generously self-righteous flair. Richard Nixon, whipping boy for the soul of America, actually did some good those four years. The man was a sparring partner for a nation struggling against the fat of Bicentennial complacency, always offering his glass jaw as a sacrifice to a nation worried about whether it still held the thunder in its looping left hook. Only...
...half years ago, Beatty began building a mansion near his pal Jack Nicholson's spread on Mulholland Drive; there isn't a soul in Hollywood who believes that Beatty will ever move into it. "There's no anchor in Warren's life," observes one friend. "Warren is always on the go," says Arthur Penn. "He travels light and takes one small suitcase from coast to coast. I guess you'd call him a very rich migrant worker." Last week Beatty arrived in New York to organize the advance screenings of Heaven Can Wait and harass the Paramount sales force with...
Grandier (Nicholas Pennell) is the sexiest of priests and the soul of romantic ardor, whether consoling widows or initiating virgins. He is also witty, proud and urbanely condescending, almost courting enemies low and high. The highest, Cardinal Richelieu, has him brought to trial, at which he is condemned and burned at the stake...
...succeeds only on the level of base, mindless entertainment--and even then, its appeal increases in geometric proportion to the blood-lust of the reader. Like In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter, .44 appeals directly to the mass murderer in each of us, that frightening corner of the soul that feels a morbid thrill each time the television announcer breaks into Edge of Night with news of some new mindless horror. But perhaps for that very reason, books such as .44 might actually be a public service, a means of measuring, by their very popularity, the current level of savagery...