Word: frontiersman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fowler boomed out of Colorado in 1918, a tall, ruggedly handsome frontiersman who had earned his journalistic spurs on the brassy Denver Post. He soon became an ornament on William Randolph Hearst's New York American, along with Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner. Fowler's style was purple but compassionate: when Ruth Brown Snyder and her paramour Judd Gray were electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1928, his account of the execution-reprinted in full in this book-was a bitter indictment of capital punishment...
...aging frontiersman is surrounded by an entourage of relatives, managers, flacks (Harvey Keitel, Joel Grey, Kevin McCarthy) who are devoted about equally to managing his affairs profitably and to seeing that his egocentric whims do not cut too deeply into those profits. As usual in Altman's films, the minor characters are hilariously venal, conning themselves relentlessly, the better to con the public. The film's best running gag has Geraldine Chaplin as sharpshooting Annie Oakley, sniping closer, ever closer to Frank Butler, her husband, who must hold her targets steady while fighting against growing fear...
...this hardy era was the immense national feeling of self-confidence-the feeling, summed up in the phrase still imprinted on the back of every dollar bill, that America was a "new order of the ages." Toward the impressive contemporary Europe of Beethoven, Hegel, Napoleon and Goethe, the rude frontiersman was patronizing: his own land was the democratic future, free of the Old World's privileges and wars. "Every stroke of the ax and hoe," Henry Adams wrote sardonically, "made him a capitalist and made gentlemen of his children...
...founder, French Explorer Antoine Laumet la Mothe Cadillac. But many Midwestern communities that want to emphasize regional history in their Bicentennial celebrations have had to draw on the events of a century after the Revolution. In Indianapolis, the state museum is constructing a diorama portraying the exploits of Frontiersman George Rogers Clark. A group in Chicago is restoring several turn-of-the-century mansions that were once owned by such business giants as Merchant Marshall Field and Railroad Car Manufacturer George Pullman. Downstate Illinois is threatened with a surfeit of Lincolnania. About 25 communities plan to commemorate Lincoln, including Springfield...
...conjure up domestic felicity, but their relationship is as superficial as the Instamatic photos he takes of her. Bronson, who is supposed to be attractive, has the film presence of a slab of ham. And thus his acts emerge not as the brave and pragmatic doings of the frontiersman, but as the petty and snivelling expression of a tiny mind...