Word: townsfolk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Middlebury (pop. 7,000), a calendar-picture college town nestled in the heart of Vermont's richest farm land, the old school spirit prevailed. Middlebury College students ate their evening meals by candlelight and the townsfolk gave away tickets for a regular Friday-night football game to those who had turned off their lamps and television sets. A community cookout followed the game-over wood fires, naturally. The elderly warmed their feet by keeping time to a fiddlers' contest...
Like animals long used to a chafing yoke, the townsfolk can take known evils in stride. Ill winds from the outside world bring them something worse. Two engineers arrive to oversee the laying of railroad lines that will forever end the isolation of the town. The local timber merchant, Pritykin (Gary Bayer), hopes to grasp the railroad-ties concession in his sweaty palms. But mostly the villagers treat the coming of the engineers as if it were a visit from royalty, bringing a scent of urbanity to their drab dismal lives...
...phantasmagoric parable by translating the writer's prose into cinematic and dramatic terms. The film's settings are glutted with eclectic religious artifacts and the documentary details of the backwater South. The cast, including even bit players who appear as cops, used-car salesmen and townsfolk, features enough oddballs to staff a Tennessee Williams repertory company. Huston's only lapses are a few purple flashback sequences that accomplish little beyond allowing the di rector to appear onscreen as Hazel's grandfather. Still, those moviegoers who have a taste for Wise Blood are not going to cavil...
...commercial tax base. Before the storm an estimated 40 to 60 per cent of the town's residents received some sort of public assistance. Since the storm the Federal government has declared the town a disaster area. Lining up by the thousands at the temporary relief center, the townsfolk wait for the food stamps and the Salvation Army's vouchers for heating oil supplements that have sustained them since the storm...
...most important of all, the government has sent experts and money to make reconstruction a possibility. The townsfolk grew up believing in the benificence of the federal government and the sanctity of the New Deal: they moved from Boston's decaying white ethnic neighborhoods to Hull with the aid of the G.I. Bill. Once again, they consider themselves entitled to aid to preserve their meager economic standing. Homeowners, 90 per cent of whom lacked flood insurance, will be paying up to $1200 annually for the next two or three decades for the government's low interest loans...