Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Adrian Cronauer is a military misfit. As protagonist of the first major service comedy about Viet Nam -- and what sometimes seems to be the last, dead-on surreal word on the subject -- he appears in Saigon in 1965 out of uniform and out of step with army manners, protocol and discipline. An irrepressibly irreverent motormouth, he is unable to fit the format of Armed Forces Radio (basically hygiene lectures and Mantovani records), where he is the new disk jockey...
Animals dominate the fantasies of children, but no one is sure what occupies the minds of animals. Tejima, a Japanese artist, offers one surmise in Fox's Dream (Philomel; $13.95). The furry protagonist is pictured in stark, evocative woodcuts as he prowls through wintry forests. His dream reveals that warm-blooded creatures differ more in style than substance. Like any sensible human, the quick brown fox longs for sunshine, warm days and someone to play with...
...love. But as adapted for Streisand by Tom Topor and veteran Screenwriters Darryl Ponicsan and Alvin Sargent, it too often surrenders to the banalities of its genre. For Nuts exemplifies one kind of Hollywood high-mindedness: the "I'm O.K. Because Society Says I'm Not O.K." movie. The protagonist is not insane, merely misunderstood by those who impose rules she refuses to play by. Every time an authority figure declares she is incompetent, her sanity is supposed to be affirmed. This is no-risk psychodrama. And no drama as well, because Claudia's moral superiority is too easy...
...suggests a Gary Cooper stripped of moral authority and ill at ease in a grown-up dilemma. Her intimidating energy recalls the young Katharine Hepburn but with a voracious libido. And behind them both stands another more portly silhouette: the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. Dan is the basic Hitchcock protagonist, a fairly decent man in a horribly compromised position. And at first glance, Alex, with her cool allure, seems an avatar of Hitchcock's blond ice goddesses. Only later do we discover she is as lonely and lethal as Mother Bates. But with a difference. In Psycho the woman with...
...black limousines and border checkpoints. But Moore's decidedly up-to-the-minute subject, invoking issues as topical as liberation theology and the Solidarity movement in Poland, is % the way in which a religious leader in a political world separates good causes from mixed motives. As Moore's protagonist, Cardinal Stephen Bem, asks an aide, "Are we filling the churches because we love God more than before? Or do we do it out of nostalgia for the past, or, worse, to defy the government? Because if we do . . . then God is mocked...