Word: spaghetti
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...like to do." The audience shouts "work" and the Proposition improvises skits about a bum who never works, the aching back of a Russian who shovels snow all day, and finally they celebrate the liberation from all work with an Irish jig. Food suggestions provoke songs about spaghetti, "just pouring out" and steaks "on burning black eyes." While one member of the group sings the others play imaginary musical instruments...
...peace button, her Black Panther button, her S.D.S. button, her "Kill the Pigs" button, her bib overalls or her carefully teased blonde Afro wig. He didn't even wince when she accidentally let loose a - and a - over the Chianti, and a Holy -! and a - during the spaghetti. In fact, I could only see the faintest spark behind his Coca-Cola green glasses when she patted his shiny bald dome. I knew, though, that somewhere behind those shades Luke was figuring exactly how many kilowatts it would take to straighten out that Afro and melt those buttons...
Among the "classics" canonized in Confessions of a Cultist are Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Hitchcock's The Birds, Preminger's Advise and Consent. All are auteur genre items; Sarris rarely has the flexibility of such British auteurists as Raymond Durgnat to admit that non-auteurs can produce great films. Each has raw narrative material of questionable significance, and a blatant commercial bent which made the few respectable critics feel rotten and cheated the morning after, unless trash was all they expected...
Some orchestration. Its offices in the National Press Building are a model of inefficiency. Phone wires, some disconnected, make Boren's desk look like a spaghetti bowl. Papers, stamps and stamp pads are everywhere. One example: "Cleared/Deputy Associate Assistant Chairman/Committee on Clearances/NATAPROBU." There are copies of Inaction Line, the organization's own very occasional publication; a clutch of bureaucrat pencilsfeaturing erasers at both endsand even copies of a society song called Let's Fingertap Together. Boren estimates that the organization has about 300 members, but admits the roster has not grown much...
Machine Gun McCain is an Italian gangster film in the old American tradition, manufactured with the kind of sardonic reverence that made many of the spaghetti Westerns so much cockeyed fun. The plot creaks with age: an ex-con named Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) gets sprung from the pen after serving twelve years of a life sentence. "How's it feel to be outside again, Dad?" beams his benefactor at the prison gate. "Don't ever call me that," snarls McCain, who regards his foppish son with heavy-lidded suspicion...