Word: witch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...purchase of the tract safeguards a wide variety of exotic flora and fauna. Within its boundaries are cypresses so large that eight men can barely join hands around their trunks, huge stands of water tupelo and witch hazel and thick forests of hickory, iron wood and beech. Fish such as the Atlantic sturgeon and crystal darter thrive in the waters of the new preserve, which also provides one of the only known homes of the yellow-blotched sawback turtle, a rare species that sports two humps on its back like a camel...
...Bloody Sunday; Day of the Locust) and Screenwriter William Goldman (All the President's Men) are not content with making an espionage yarn. They have tarted up their story with phony resonances intended to link it to such things as war guilt, the Nazis and the Jews, McCarthy witch-hunting, and the blight of urban decay as emblematic of modern anomie. Thrillers can deal fleetly with ideas, even difficult ones...
Well, combine this image with that of a nervous, bumbling graduate student in history at Columbia, in the process of writing a doctoral dissertation designed to clear the name of his late father, a noted historian driven to alcoholism, and finally, to suicide by the McCarthy witch hunts, and you'll have something of a notion of what makes Marathon Man an outstanding thriller...
Johnson had to go airborne to retrieve it, but when he came down he quickly realized that he had as much chance of getting off a good kick as the Wicked Witch of the West did when Dorothy hurled the bucket of water...
Before long, Allen is fronting for more than one talented writer. Then come the investigators. The witch-hunters just cannot believe that a scriptwriter this skillful has not committed an investigatable offense. Along the way Allen becomes involved with a comic named Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel), whose career is destroyed by the witch-hunters and who then destroys himself. Allen's consciousness (and his conscience) have been steadily expanding. In the end, he heroically-and funnily -defies the congressional committee that tries to pry from him at least a few suspect names...