Word: wildering
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Many adult Americans were shocked by the most obvious manifestations of the new romanticism-nudity, casual sex, obscenity, absurd dress, confrontation tactics. These were, of course, intended to shock. In describing some of his wilder contemporaries, Françoise René de Châteaubriand might have been talking about Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin when they confronted a House Un-American Activities subcommittee: "They rig themselves up as comic sketches, as grotesques, as caricatures. Some of them wear frightful mustaches; one would suppose that they are going forth to conquer the world." The heroes upon whom the romantics model...
...even the high professionalism of his Broadway production can disguise the fact that Thornton Wilder's Our Town was, is and always will be a humanities lecture with visual aids. The principal aids are the characters, who, ike the tables and chairs on the otherwise barren set, are deployed in a series of vignettes by the Stage Manager. His is the unenviable job of trying to be a Greek chorus to just folks. The lecture part of the play stresses the importance of the familiar things of life, and that each day should be savored as if it were...
...Affair of Honor, Wilder...
...Agnew, the wilder youngsters are a "breed of losers," to whom he juxtaposed "our heroes" returning from Viet Nam "without limbs or eyes, with scars they shall carry the rest of their lives." The burden of the message was clear: right-thinking Americans must choose between those who win the red badge of courage and those who wave the red flag of dishonor. Without question, the more extreme antiwar partisans have earned that kind of comparison. The real issue, however, is not the courage of those who fight the war but whether their courage is being expended wisely...
Another marked result of the progression of Wilder's nastiness from Fortune is the clear phase-out of love and romance as important elements in the director's world view. In the latter, most recent picture, Wilder once and for all stops paying his rather vulgar homage to Ernst Lubitsch's lyricism and reduces love to a mere pawn in the chess game of human greed. Those who were fooled into thinking Wilder had some subconscious joie de vivre underneath his cynicism by his earlier pictures can't possibly believe that after The Fortune Cookie , where he shows...