Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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EASY RIDER. From the unpromising material of drugs and motorcycles, debuting Director Dennis Hopper has made a strong odyssey starring himself, Peter Fonda and a brilliant newcomer named Jack Nicholson. The film occasionally slips into self-pity, but the places and the faces of mid-America are true and tragic...
...Bastille Day cocktail party in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, a slow old C-47 transport plane circled the city. One of the plane doors opened and out rolled a bomb that landed harmlessly in a muddy field. It was the Honduran capital's first taste of the tragic and senseless miniwar that erupted last week between Honduras and El Salvador. At two points along the ill-defined border, Salvadoran troops pushed into Honduras, and the small air force of each country flew raids against military and industrial targets. After five days of fighting, the Organization of American States...
...swaggering bawdiness of the Drama Club's Mandragora, the Machiavelli farce. Czech acting at its frequent best combines an animal energy with the timing of aerial acrobats. Czechs make superb comedians, and have that highest comic skill-to slip with a flash of the eye into the tragic mask. Czech direction is passionately intelligent. In Architect Josef Svoboda, they have the most imaginative stage designer working anywhere today...
...around a series of burlesque devices: there is a set of three doors to facilitate confusion, lots of ramps and runways that bring the actors right up to their audience, and a piano at dead center to give the whole thing some stability. In short, this juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic pinpoints the mentality of a people who have survived politics (both their side's and the other's) only because they have grown accustomed to treating life and all it brings as, at best, a blasphemous joke. As The Hostage makes clear, even death--however black...
...inequitable system by which peasants are forced to turn over 25% to 50% of their harvests as rent to absentee landlords. If that advice had been heeded earlier, former U.S. Ambassador to India Chester Bowles recently mused, "it is unlikely that American troops would now be involved in that tragic country, fighting against peasant guerrillas." Bowles knows that the tragedy of Viet Nam cannot be explained quite so simply, but there is much truth in what he says. The gift of land is the surest way to win any peasant's loyalty...