Word: venalities
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...statesman, but a potent show-biz vote-getter. However, whether director Michael Ritchie and screenwriter Jeremy Larner feel this process necessary, and McKay's actions morally justified, is unclear. In the context of easy ironies that the film develops, in which all men are power-hungry or venal on a solely personal level, it is foolish to invoke moral considerations at all: though I presume that the attitude the filmmakers wanted to express was "this is the way the system works, and if we want to change it from within, we will have to temper our idealism." (Pretty apt sentiments...
...Hitchcock's best films, he sincerely sees the world as peopled with fearful venal masses and one or two innocent individuals who manage to rise above their values and are beaten down for it; because of the accuracy of troubled social backgrounds the audience is engaged sympathetically. The wronged heroes of The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes and now Frenzy are trapped by histories of international war and British impotence. The first two innocents were caught up in pre-World War II subterfuge; Dick Blainey of Frenzy is a ripe Jimmy Porter figure, an RAF squadron leader (when could...
Mike Nichols, L.H.D., stage and film director. [He] has stimulated the laughter of millions, and in that process exposed to the light of comedy much that is pretentious, venal and false in contemporary life...
...original Beggar's Opera. The dominant motif-Gay's as well as Brecht's-is that money is thicker than blood. By now, the characters are classic, and they all live up to their names: Peachum (Gordon Cornell), the informer and fence; Lockit (Ralston Hill), the venal jailer of Newgate; and MacHeath (Timothy Jerome), the saucy highwayman who can down a wench as quickly as a cup of sack. As two of the ladies of his choice, Polly Peachum (Kathleen Widdoes) and Lucy Lockit (Marilyn Sokol) are erotic sprites...
...artists in South Vietnam are not all venal. Some are; but many are just trying to exist in a terribly confused setting. What would happen to them if the North Vietnamese take over? The more corrupt, who have already made their fortunes, would probably flee, and wisely so. The rest would stay and try to make their peace with the new regime. I am sure that some of them would be killed and some imprisoned, but probably not many. There was no mass slaughter in the North in 1955 and 1956. Most Vietnamese with strong feelings about political freedom have...