Word: toughness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last, the story you have been waiting for! About a tough hombre who burst into the world of letters with boundless energy, a hungry heart and a typewriter stuffed with lusty words. He churned out blockbusters like The Carpetbaggers, The Adventurers and The Inheritors, books crammed with characters who caress and curse, curse and caress their way through life. "I'm a people writer," he has explained. And right he is: though critics may jeer his work is "tripe" and "crud," the people have made him a millionaire many times over. A mansion in Beverly Hills! A villa...
...these war scenes may be the most spectacular battle ever created for a film. With a megalomaniacal officer (Robert Duvall) leading the charge, a cavalry of American helicopters wipes out an entire Vietnamese village. The display of aerial hardware is immense, the rush of explosions dizzying. Duvall's tough but nutty commander would do justice to Joseph Heller: as bullets whiz by him on all sides, he engages his men in an obsessive debate about surfing...
...metal letter, and how to maintain a kind of iconic austerity in an impure medium that could easily become cluttered with props and set dressing. Segal is no formalist, but his sense of the abstract underpinning of sculpture cuts down on what might otherwise have become a tough-but-tender street sentimentality. He is, as the catalogue suggests, a "proletarian mythmaker," though not in a political sense; and no other sculptor working in America today has done more to revive the human figure as a subject...
...names of the county judges on the ballot. A campaign for office is an inexact gauge of how a judge will behave if elected. New York Court of Appeals Judge Sol Wachtler made a TV commercial showing him, dressed in his robes, slamming shut a jail door. This tough-on-crime approach was good politics, but voters favoring a law-and-order man were probably disappointed. Wachtler turned out to be, if anything, defense-minded. To get on a partisan ballot often requires a financial contribution to a political party. A New York judge remembers one candidate coming...
...learn that this alarming vulnerability is an affectation and a part of her strategy as a writer. Despite all the fits of weeping and the killer migraines and the California dreads that blow across her novels and essays like the Santa Ana winds, Didion is on the whole as tough as a bounty hunter, and about as fragile as a brick of molybdenum. The wounded bird is even something of a predator...