Word: villainous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Warlock (20th Century-Fox) is a two-hour, $2,000,000 western with three major stars (Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn), two main heroes, two main villains, three main plots, five subplots, eight cooling corpses, and nine major outbreaks of violence. Hero No. 1 (Fonda), a sort of Good Bad Guy, is a notorious gunman who wears gold-handled Colts. The townspeople of Warlock ask him to protect them from Villain No. 1 (Tom Drake), a Bad Bad Guy with a slow sneer, a fast draw, and plenty of sneaking dry-gulchers on his payroll. Unfortunately, Hero...
...from a local court. But Kovacs only leers happily around his cigar, and his lawyers inform her lawyer (Jack Lemmon): "We have the entire appellate structure of the State of Maine before us." Deciding that two can play dirty pool, the heroine slaps a writ of execution on the villain, "attaches" the next train that happens to come through town, parks it on a spur track and challenges the brute to top that. He does. He demands rent for the spur track - $1 a foot...
...heroine of course cannot raise that kind of money-but the public can and does. Aroused by the brave little woman's battle with the corporate dragon, millions of televiewers produce a deluge of dimes for a fight-the-villain fund. With Odyssean shrewdness, Kovacs pretends to yield. He makes the heroine a present of the train. Unfortunately, he announces with an evil snicker, that leaves him without a train to serve the town. The horrified townspeople turn against the heroine. Has the villain triumphed? As far as the spectator is concerned, there was never any contest. Who could...
...Villainous Christians. In the 19th century, when Townsend Harris, the first U.S. consul, was working out the first commercial treaty with Japan, the main difficulties he met concerned religious freedom for foreigners. Persecution of Japanese Christians was modified somewhat in 1871, when a Japanese diplomatic mission to the U.S. and Europe was greeted by a storm of indignation at the recent deportation of 60 Christian heads of families in the Nagasaki* area. In 1873 the shogunate removed the notices posted in every Japanese marketplace and on street corners threatening death to anyone who turned Christian or harbored Christians. But until...
...parody of the heroic style. It was difficult to tell at first whether the action was farcial by intent or accident ("Where did I get the nerve?" muses the soprano after telling off Xerxes), but as the melodramatic cliches become less widely spaced the audience turned partisan, hissing the villain with all its might. As is proper in a drama of love, war, and deception, there is a chorus strutting about occasionally, singing things like "Prepare to fight with skill and might," and a priestess (attractively played by Elizabeth Theiler) going through a mystic ritual-dance...