Word: vividness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...play The Reluctant Rapist would hold up very well. Bullins's sparse and direct prose reads more like stage directions in setting the scenes for his characters to deliver their earthy and vivid verbal banterings that make up the bulk of the work. But as a novel The Reluctant Rapist fails; it's characterizations shabby and incomplete, its treatment of the complexities of ghetto life simplistic...
...kind of manipulation of conditions so that the problem or the solution seemed fresh to the point of being raw. He had, for example, carefully kept his grandson dancing on a string of unease over this guide boat. On the one hand, he wanted it to be as vivid as only uncertainty could make it; and, on the other, he could not resist the dicey gaming around, the spirals of manipulation that were the actual texture of his life...
...looks dingy but never hokey. The photography keeps the backgrounds in as sharp perspective as possible, letting each viewer select his own point of focus. In that respect, this Iceman resembles the style of Orson Welles' banquet scene in Citizen Kane, in which each face was vivid at a long table. The technique creates a pervasive sense of being enclosed that, paradoxically, never makes the eye feel cramped...
...Marvin's Hickey has the hype and the patter but only a portion of the necessary bravura. He seems to be wrestling with the vivid memory of Jason Robards in the same role, a performance of such passion that it became definitive. It may be unfair for an actor to carry such a burden, but Marvin does not carry it well. His Hickey is tentative, almost halting...
...conversation is still vivid in my mind today: He was polite, relaxed, attentive and unhostile. He nodded, reflected, took off his spectacles, put hand to chin and studied me a while, knocked out his pipe-ash on the round cork knob within the center of a pewter bowl, looked out the window with a weary sense of aging decency, pressed thumb and finger to his brow in old and practiced sense of sorrowful exhaustion. He said to me this: "Of course it's so of course it's not correct. It isn't right for some of us here...