Word: vicious
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...Four (the United States, the U.S.S.R., Britain and France), produced little progress. Neither Israel nor Egypt, the major antagonists, displayed any interest in compromise. On the contrary, both were intent on expanding the scale of their attacks. The pattern was clear: strike and counterstrike, with each major blow more vicious than the last...
Hard Contract's protagonist is a toothy, vicious gunman-for-hire named Cunningham (James Coburn). In the employ of an anonymous corporation whose business is murder, Cunningham jets off for Europe with a "hard contract" to eliminate three top men who were themselves organization assassins. He manages well enough until he meets an attractive divorcee called Sheila (Lee Remick). Before anyone can say Philosophy in the Bedroom, Cunningham and Sheila are under the same bedspread, where they spend most of their time discussing doom, guilt, predestination, war, violence, murder and the population explosion...
...feeling of helplessness results. Without sensibility, Godard's characters cannot possibly cope with their setting; the relation between them and a generally vicious society (filled with burning automobiles and corpses) becomes one of simple conflict. The setting assumes a more independent existence and begins to attack the audience directly, without the characters' mediation. Shocking events come to rule the film, so that it becomes far more singly directed, far less ambiguous, than Godard's earlier movies. And it becomes less personal. With no complexity possible in the meeting of characters and environment through their sensibilities, idealism is slaughtered, characters lose...
Some of her victims wish they had a column in which to call her something like Miss VV (Vile and Vicious) or BB (Biting and Bitchy). Sweet Julie Andrews drops her Mary Poppins mask and says of Haber: "She needs open-heart surgery-and they should go in through her feet." Director Blake Edwards charges that "Haber's writing is so blatantly vicious and her motivation so disturbed that she really adds up to a psychiatric case...
Stab in the Back. The Allies, Watt suggests, might have been able to prevent this vicious right-left polarization of Germany. Instead, by imposing a Carthaginian peace, they undercut the moderates and strengthened extremists. The Versailles Treaty ceded parts of German territory to other nations and burdened Germany with staggering reparations. Though the moderate Socialist government had no choice but to sign the treaty on Germany's behalf, it afterward came under incessant attack from the right for that "stab in the back"-the allegedly ignominious capitulation to the enemy. The Weimar Republic was already fatally weakened from...