Word: undercutting
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...year, the first primary in which candidates risk being eliminated. Rural and industrial, populated by blue-collar workers, farmers, ethnic minorities and students, Wisconsin is known for its independent, sophisticated and erratic voting behavior; it was the home of Senator Joe McCarthy, but also of Robert LaFollette. John Kennedy undercut Humphrey there in 1960, and it was on the eve of the 1968 Wisconsin primary that Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race, just before Eugene McCarthy swept the state...
Yates and Goldman set a facetious tone throughout most of the film (Redford, admired by Segal for his "nerves of steel," suffers from gastritis). But the jokes do not so much supplement the tension as undercut it. Combining satire and suspense is a treacherous business. Only Hitchcock (as in North by Northwest) has really been able to manage it. His wit, visual sophistication and editorial wizardry are greatly missed in The Hot Rock...
...seriously qualified. For if the "direct application of mechanical and conventional power" takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary war no longer operate. The Maoist-inspired rural revolution is undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution...
There is a studied ambivalence towards ideals in The French Connection, never strong enough to undercut the conventional cops and crooks concerns of this "thriller," but nonetheless arresting in the social perspective it allows. Retelling the essentials of an actual case of heroin smuggling from France into New York. William Friedkin's film concentrates on the facts and mechanics of narcotics detective work, and the intense, long-term efforts of two cops to trace $32 million in heroin and to pinch the underworld business associates making the transaction...
...will bomb North Vietnam as much as he pleases until the very end, November 3, 1972. In the meantime, recent setbacks in Cambodia and Laos as well as expectation of an imminent offensive by North Vietnamese and PRG forces in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam seem to undercut the President's bold rhetoric. And, when Nixon is in Peking in February, the leaders of the Indochinese revolutionaries will be having a strategy session of their own in Hanoi...