Word: virtuousness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...however, is like a case of aggravated assault, so eager, so desperate is it to be funny. Director Peter Yates (Bullitt) manages action briskly enough, but the script remains intractable. It was written by the authors of Pillow Talk and offers the same sort of antique situation comedy: a virtuous woman flirts with immorality and emerges unsullied and, indeed, victorious. Achieving this happy result requires some odd fancy-stepping. Pete, knowing that his wife had tried to be a whore (but not knowing, as the audience does, that she had been unsuccessful at it), forgives her by giving...
What I am suggesting is that, with wide variation among departments and institutions, the abstract principles of the editorial, like other virtuous declarations, may be self-defeating...
...from the grip of the story and Al Pacino's soulful lead performance, Serpico is superficial, even heartless. The filmmakers have done no original investigations, and accept the reportage of Peter Maas as gospel. In their film, no other cop besides Serpico and an idealistic inspector are at all virtuous; Serpico's Ivy League associate, David Durk, is here preening and pompous, nothing like the dedicated, befuddled naif whom even Maas found sincere. And Lumet, Salt and Wexler never detail the reluctance of police higher-ups to listen to Serpico: New York City and police officials are cardboard figures...
...16th century Chinese novel, is romantic, melodramatic and at times mildly erotic. Westerners will detect elements of The Perils of Pauline and The Story of O. The 3,525-line poem recounts 15 hellish years in the life of a young girl, Vuong Thuy Kieu. She is beautiful, talented, virtuous-and just headstrong enough to make her interesting in spite of her other sterling qualities. To help pay her family's debts, Kieu sells herself into concubinage and is tricked into becoming a common whore in the house of a ruthless madam. Thereafter Kieu is ravaged, reviled and degraded...
Such airs, though, are drunken sport for Sir Toby Belch and company as they plot to entangle the most self-righteous courtier ever created. "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?" thunders Sir Toby to puritanical Malvolio, who, for his pains, ends up locked up and abused as a madman...