Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Slade's protagonist is Scottie Templeton (Jack Lemmon '47), a divorced, once-promising writer who has squandered his talents on second-rate movies and television--and has had a damn good time in the process. Only his priggish 20-year-old son Jud seems to despise him; they haven't seen each other for two years when Jud comes to visit. Scottie wants them to spend time together, but Jud counters each of his father's jokes and suggestions with icy, detached monosyllables, preferring to journey off to a museum exhibit alone. Scottie's doctor arrives and breaks the news...
Tribute is a rich play, not brilliant but solid. The characters who surround the protagonist--his sympathetic ex-wife, tolerant, devoted doctor, et al--are stock, but Slade fuses each of them with life. As a one-time writer of sit-coms (over 100, it is reported), he must have learned how to play around with stereotypes, searching for that one little crack of humanity in which to insert his fingers, opening the character up. Scottie's business partner, for example, is a huggable, Jewish, Lou Jacobi-type (warmly played by A. Larry Haines), the character who kids in plays...
Freelance.* The phrase suggests freedom, adventure and the protagonist of a thousand B movies, Berlin-bound on the night train with a dream and an Olivetti. The dream, however, has turned sour. For most freelancers, magazine writing today has become the slum of journalism-overcrowded, underpaid, littered with rejection slips-and the denizens are growing restless. "It's a synonym for unemployed bum," grumbles John Jerome, who left the editorship of Skiing a decade ago to write for himself and has spent half that time in debt. Warren G. Bovée, acting dean of the Marquette University journalism...
...protagonist of Greene's latest novel, The Human Factor, doesn't even have the long-lost piety to hang on to. He still sneaks into an occasional church (he's an ex-Protestant, not Catholic), and tries to summon up guilt and contrition, but somehow nothing happens. What Maurice Castle, middle-echelon British intelligence officer, near retirement age and with jurisdiction over Africa, lives for is security and peace of mind. All Castle really treasures is his routine, his two double whiskies before dinner, his comfortable house in the town outside London where he grew up, and his family. This...
...movie as bleak and uncompromising as this new Dustin Hoffman vehicle-misplaced guts. The story of a compulsive small-time crook with a lousy past and a doomed future, Straight Time makes a fetish of refusing the audience any frills. The movie aims only to describe its unappealing protagonist as coolly as possible-without tears or laughs or passion. This it accomplishes, but at a very steep price: while Straight Time offers a convincing portrait of a loser, it never gives us any reason to care whether the portrait is genuine...