Word: thrillers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...central figure of The Hadrian Ransom (Putnam; 275 pages; $9.95) wins this year's award for Most Unusual Kidnapee: Pope Hadrian IX. The holy heist in Allan Duane's psychological thriller has been planned by three disgruntled Americans and Rosella Asti, daughter of Italy's Ambassador to Washington. While the whole civilized world weeps and prays, the intricately plotted caper goes as smoothly as a sacrament-until the Red Brigades horn in on the action and the $4 million ransom money. The hero in the end is il Papa, a man of great energy, guile and charity...
Canning, one of the very best of the English thriller writers, with 35 titles to his credit, combines suspense with ro mance, erudition and sardonic wit. He also reveals hard facts about some soft underBellies of Britain...
...Jack Herbein, Metropolitan Edison's vice president for power generation, in a memorable engineer's euphemism, as merely "a normal aberration." Reassuring statements spewed from the plant's press spokesmen, sounding as if they were taken right out of the script for the film The China Syndrome, a thriller that depicts nuclear plant officials as placing greed for profits far above their concern for public safety. But if the movie, starring real-life Antinuclear Activist Jane Fonda, is unfair in its villainous caricature of power-and construction-industry officials, its basic premise will no longer seem so farfetched to those...
...would have been easy to make a routinely satisfying little thriller out of The China Syndrome, plenty of slam-bang action coupled with a little cheap preachment about atomic perils. But by keeping the polemic almost entirely implicit, by building solid central characterizations into the plot, and by framing the whole thing with quick, shrewd observations (Fonda's career-girl pad, for example, is perfectly disorganized), the movie tran scends its disaster-thriller origins −and its politics. Proponents of nuclear power are right to be concerned about this picture...
...film entertains as a first-rate thriller while carrying a rather clear--if unsophisticated--political message. The China Syndrome is a fine example of what film can do: it manipulates you and scares...