Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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True, some mercenary flights manage to offend. Judith Campbell Exner tastelessly trod on a national icon in My Story, the tale of her sexual adventures with President John F. Kennedy and Gangster Sam Giancana. Putative Aristocrat Sydney Biddle Barrows' best-selling book The Mayflower Madam -- and the forthcoming TV movie -- raises the grating spectacle of a woman thumbing her nose at the system that convicted her of promoting prostitution...
Unfortunately, the big bad wolf of this fairy tale lurks behind every senior tutor's door. Most students don't have fairy godmothers to spirit them out of Ad Board meetings and "disciplinary probation" is not a magic word...
Phil Alden Robinson, the writer-director of In the Mood, does not seek even the modest parable. He is all amiability recounting the true tale of "Sonny" Wisecarver, the 1940s California teen who twice eloped with older women and became a media sensation. Patrick Dempsey, Talia Balsam and Beverly D'Angelo agreeably impart the message that adolescent sexual energy can cheerily compensate for lack of sexual sophistication. But one cannot help feeling that there is a wicked craziness in their odd couplings that escaped a directorial eye looking merely for goofiness...
...happened is a typical tale of oil-patch woe. When petroleum prices were high in the late 1970s, First City lent extensively to oil-rig builders and small supply firms. When prices later plunged, loan defaults skyrocketed. First City then boosted its presence in real estate loans -- and that market softened. As foreclosures mounted, First City's management offered Arabian horses, Porsches or 40-ft. yachts to new customers who maintained accounts of $100,000 and up. The gimmicks did not lure enough high rollers to stanch First City's losses, and talk of a takeover, bailout or shutdown mounted...
Jablonski bolsters the romantic tale of the young composer brilliantly burning out before his time. But in this case the story is true, and the question of what Gershwin might have accomplished remains. As Kay Swift conjectures, "We'll never know, will we? But it would have been important...