Word: villainized
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...ramifications of a police officer turning on his brethren, it fascinates absolutely, even over a corpulent three hours. Ciello is an informer, a curiously ambiguous role throughout American history, and director Sidney Lumet has accepted and used brilliantly that ambiguity, refusing to portray Ciello as either hero or villain. Americans have never been entirely comfortable with the informer, but informers have periodically (though often only temporarily) emerged as heroes. The name-namers of the McCarthy period offer the most striking example of evaporating national acclaim, while the Watergate tattlers have generally enhanced their reputations. Ciello falls somewhere in the middle...
...discoursed in a series of semiprecious mots: "I hate posterity. It's so fond of having the last word." Another was Clovis Sangrail, a young man much given to the kind of "gorgeous hoax" that might scandalize a dull house party. Last came Comus Bassington, the hero-villain-victim of Saki's splendid novel The Unbearable Bassington, a tribute to lost youth that discovers deep sadness in the social shallows of Edwardian England...
...President Anwar Sadat has described him as "a mental case" and "a lunatic." African neighbors fear his expansionist ambitions. The U.S. considers him an international outlaw and has accused him of meddling in no fewer than 45 nations. When Authors Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre were looking for a villain to cast as the mastermind of a plot to hold New York City up for nuclear blackmail in their novel The Fifth Horseman, they naturally settled upon Gaddafi...
...equally gripping scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark shows Toht, the German villain (Ronald Lacey), dissolving into a puddle. How did Makeup Man Chris Walas do it? He began by taking a life mold of the actor's face. From that he made a plaster skull, which he covered with layers of chilled gelatin. When it came time for Toht to melt away, a heat gun-a super hair dryer-was turned on and the gelatin began to drip. So ended that particular Nazi menace...
...Bernard Bailyn has pointed out in his sympathetic portrait of Hutchinson, the patriots' anger toward the royal governor surpassed all bounds of fairness, or even common sense. Hutchinson was a scapegoat, blamed for more crimes than even he could have committed, by a populace that had labeled him a villain and could not be convinced otherwise--even by the truth...