Word: vagrants
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...crime-ridden cities, many residents see no need to add to their woes by allowing vagrants to establish themselves in train and bus terminals and residential areas that are otherwise generally safe. In his 1975 book, Thinking About Crime, Harvard Professor James Q. Wilson says that the acceptance of vagrants, panhandlers and sleeping drunks on the sidewalk is the traditional sign that the cycle of urban decay is under way: informal controls break down, muggers and burglars move in, and stable families begin to move out. "Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person...
...statue of their school's patron saint. Mischief pairs a wimp and a stud in the small-town '50s. In Tomboy, Betsy Russell is a Flashdance- style mechanic who goes stock-car racing. In Vision Quest, Rocky pins Flashdance on the high school wrestling mat. One can find vagrant felicities in these films: a snap to the style of Tuff Turf; the bang-on casting of young actors with unassimilated Irish-American faces in Heaven Help Us; and in Vision Quest some nice quirks of dialogue and a lovely performance by Matthew Modine that makes the whole hokey business...
...clean wind and open sea, excitedly reading Camus, Gogol and works of Zen. But the real strength of his personal record is its collection of stories overheard, incidents chanced upon, sorrows glimpsed by accident-the random scraps out of which Fugard fashioned his plays. As he listens to a vagrant's life story, accompanies a friend to court, watches two blacks carrying a wooden box through the night, Fugard registers and captures the keening images that are the very stuff of vibrant theater...
When melodrama did surface at the festival, it could seem as out of place as a punk in an Amish Sunday school. John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea sets a couple of urban pit dogs-a Bronx hoodlum (John Turturro) and a vagrant young mother (June Stein)-at each other's throats with coarsely romantic results, but the conclusion is too optimistic to be quite convincing. The Undoing, by William Mastrosimone, offers promise of a fascinating character: a woman (Debra Monk), now running her late husband's poultry business, whose rage...
...unshaven vagrant is grubby; an unshaven Tom Selleck is rugged...