Word: tonk
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...movie is a honky-tonk panorama of contemporary America and most of its obvious contradictions: a flagrant, nearly frenzied, workaday energy and a kind of moral deadness; a proud regard for history and heritage and an abiding need to construct a synthetic mythology; a sweeping national certitude and the hypocrisy that comes with it. Altman is fearless in his thematic ambitions for Nashville, and it is a good measure of his success that the movie is always fleet and supple, never top-heavy. The director and his talented collaborator Joan Tewkesbury (who also did the screenplay for Altman...
...book is as full of holes as some of the bullet-sieved characters. Roxie Hart (Gwen Verdon), a honky-tonk '20s entertainer, murders her lover and beats the rap, thanks to a slick mouthpiece, Billy Flynn (Jerry Orbach). This scarcely matters. What matters is the erotic poetry in motion that uncoils whenever Verdon and her sister in crime Velma Kelly (Chita Rivera) do their solos and duets. They pace the show with spunk incarnate. The chorus is jazzily bacchanalian, and Patricia Zipprodt's eye-riveting costumes swirl right out of a decadent Brechtian Berlin. Chicago is a cinch...
...just finished her sixth movie in the past two years, and last week she began work on her seventh, Alfred Hitchcock's Deceit. She has not sought out safe, sympathetic parts. She has played the teasing Faye Greener in The Day of the Locust, the honky-tonk waitress Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces, the low-down and libidinous Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, and the victimized Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint. Right now she is within hailing distance of being what she calls "a first-rank star...
...Middle of the World beckons with the promise of that all-too-rare film that synthesizes the two great battles of life, the political and the sexual. The action moves from the smoky back room, where cynical machine men map out the fate of society, to the honky tonk cafe, where a tacit smile and a pair of pretty legs determine the fate of individuals, and in the process we seem to get a valuable glance into the multi-dimensional world of both man as social animal and man as existential wanderer...
...quivering little bundle of sadomasochism, helping the two drivers and destroying them at the same time. Unfortunately, Strick does not get around to concentrating on her or developing the character beyond a flat concept. He is content to let her quiver while he takes pictures of the honky-tonk at the side of the road...