Word: yarns
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...movie is plagued by self-inflatable notions of its own importance. Director John Schlesinger (Sunday, 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...
...they do, splendidly. There is the yarn about the innocent temptress from Biloxi, Miss., and the odd revenge she takes on the man who steals her away. That one is topped by the tale of the fastest Jeep in the world and a deadly race in the Mexican foothills. A graduate student contributes a chiller about a pack of man-eating cats in his home town...
...revival. Ballantine Books has reprinted in paperback 100,000 copies each of so-so Sabatini (The Black Swan, Captain Blood Returns, Mistress Wilding). Three examples of super-Sabatini (The Sea Hawk, Scaramouche, Bellarion) are to follow. Quickly, one hopes. At his worst Sabatini is a hypnotic yarn spinner. At his best he is a semiserious novelist who, like Dumas père, uses melodrama as a billboard to lure the casual pleasure seeker into a performance more moving and intelligent than he expects...
...look has become popular in the Colonies. Not long ago, the Boston Gazette ungallantly reported the plight of a young woman whose headdress was shattered when she was thrown from her carriage by startled horses. The stuffing fell onto the road, revealing an unsavory mixture of jute fiber, wool yarn, curled wool...
...Fell to Earth, his newest and least successful effort, there is little to spell out anyway. The movie is about equally dazzling and disappointing, but where it goes wrong is in substance, not in style. Roeg's exuberance and invention are compromised here by a yarn that carries dank traces of Twilight Zone...