Word: squalidity
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Eventually the four anti-heroes land in a remote Latin American village, where stereotypes of malnourished Indians wallow stupidly in stereotypes of squalid, muddy hovels. (The village has grown up around an American oil company's rig, it seems, and for a moment we wonder whether the film's politics will make more sense than its story. But the superficially political events--an enraged populace stones a few soldiers, for instance--are unexplained rituals, bad theater without meaning or any attempt at meaning.) An oil well catches fire and to extinguish the flames the oil company needs vast quantities...
...mini-action sequences promise bigger, better things to come. This implied promise of livelier things to come also helps get us through a middle passage where Roy Scheider, as the punk criminal, and Bruno Cremer, as the banker, are seen to suffer interminable misery in some of the most squalid squalor anybody this side of a PBS documentarian has put on a screen in a long time. Friedkin has probably been more rigorous about all this than the requirements of popular film making dictate. Since he has an international cast working in a foreign locale, much of the dialogue...
...April, 244 Vietnamese have made the 1,000-mile crossing to Hong Kong; they were accepted when the U.N. guaranteed that it would cover their expenses and speed their departure after three months. About 2,000 have arrived in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines. Most are packed into squalid refugee camps, hoping for resettlement elsewhere...
...attributed to the people of southern Italy. Japan, he added, is "a superindustrialized country, where the myths of superproduction have inserted themselves in the daily reality to the point of spasm. It does not know or accept anything but the frightening morality of integral efficiency, which is the squalid religion of modern times...
...Cuban government in league with the Nazis, who wanted the ship to sail from port to port searching for asylum. The St. Louis would then become a diplomatic liability, an embarrassment, and would be an active demonstration, according to the Nazis, of what a "problem" the Jews were. This squalid footnote to the Holocaust raises some curious questions-prominent among them is why President Franklin Roosevelt turned the St. Louis away from the shores of Florida*-and comes up way short on answers. Director Stuart Rosenberg (The Drowning Pool) and Scenarists Shagan (Save the Tiger) and Butler are primarily interested...