Word: thingness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more immediate problem was food; we grubbed about in the refrigerator of a friend of a friend. A good streetfighter had to live off the land, we figured. We were really getting into the fantasy of the thing...
While I waited, I wandered about among the medics, hoping that they might be one of the focal points of the action that was about to take place. (And, anyway, since I had now become an affinity group of one, it was also quite the circumspect thing to do.) But the medics were mostly volunteers, with the kind of nervous enthusiasm common among first year section men. They kept giving every one around them suspicious looks...
...obediently up 12th Street. Up 12th, between the massive, dark blocks that were the buildings of Internal Revenue and Interstate Commerce. I kept getting these flashes of old war movies I had seen where a bomb would plop down right next to your buddy, and you'd see the thing coming at him, and, balm, your buddy would be gone. But none of these bombs were really exploding. I found myself laughing, and shouting happily to someone beside me. "Wow, they're using all the goddamn stuff up on us." It seemed hardly worth their effort, but it was mildly...
...latter). But, perhaps to counteract this, he makes the victimizers increasingly grotesque. Walter Matthau's conniving lawyer Whiplash Willie in the recent Fortune Cookie is Wilder's most terrifying caricature of humanity. Matthau, constantly shifting his eyes trying to locate the quickest buck, fails to say one generous thing during the entire picture. The cruelties of this character, as you might expect, contrast sharply with the mild evils of Wilder's first American feature, The Major and the Minor (1942), where the plot's major deception is Ginger Rogers' cheating of a railroad company out of $15. (In The Fortune...
...more you will be amazed by the man. He has done everything: trial drama ( Witness for the Prosecution ). Hollywood gothic ( Sunset Boulevard ). farce ( Some Like It Hot ), upper-crust romance ( Sabrina ). alcoholic melodrama ( The Lost Weekend ). He has done everything, and yet, he always wants the same thing from his audience-total distrust. Cynicism of the nastiest sort creeps into all of his work. While that doesn't exactly make his films pleasant, it certainly makes them unique in the history of American cinema...