Word: straightforwardness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...main thematic line is straightforward: as McKay comes ever-closer to winning his prize, he must rely ever-more on TV and other mass media to win his audience, in the process becoming less of a statesman, but a potent show-biz vote-getter. However, whether director Michael Ritchie and screenwriter Jeremy Larner feel this process necessary, and McKay's actions morally justified, is unclear. In the context of easy ironies that the film develops, in which all men are power-hungry or venal on a solely personal level, it is foolish to invoke moral considerations at all: though...
Michael Ritchie's direction is virtuosic, but cold for my taste, and given to too many cheap Kubrickian effects. The people in his crowds are apt to be repulsive, the workers in his campaign hallways too obviously on the make. His camera movements are both straightforward and slickly calculated...
...concept of naivete describes the play itself rather than the subject of the comedy. Well-played farce ought to exaggerate normal human foibles, arousing the sympathy of the audience. This production tends to pervert the characters' behavior in form as well as degree. While some of the straightforward humor of the farce remains intact, much of its charm is swallowed up in the overdone quaintness of the show...
Trimming the play to a running time of two and a quarter hours. Kahn has for the most part adopted a straightforward approach. Although the Renaissance tended to oppose Caesar--as the Middle Ages had sided with him--Shakespeare carefully saw to it that the play as a whole took no stand. The text is ambiguous, the positions balanced; hence a director may easily tilt his production toward one view or the other. Kahn takes here a neutral stand, and leaves it to the audience to weigh the evidence...
...from the man's record: director George Roy Hill has previously given us such pedestrian derivatory fairy tales as Hawaii and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Here he sticks to the book in knowledgeable, workmanlike fashion, even clearing up some narrative mess, making the whole more consistent and straightforward and thus more powerful. What he and a skilled novice screenwriter (Stephen Geller) have done is combine some of the Vonnegut reactions the author presents intermittently in his book with a now slightly-more-articulate Pilgrim. They have also cut away any digressive interludes with such past Vonnegut characters...