Word: heroics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MALTA. The offbeat Mediterranean island is soaked in history from ancient times to its heroic stand in World War II. From the warm yellow limestone buildings of Valletta to its deepwater bays and rocky coves, the 95-sq.-mi. island was filled with baroque buildings by the martial-monastic Knights of St. John, who ruled it for 268 years. The British left no legacy of haute cuisine, but some restaurants serve local dishes and good fish. Seaside hotels charge from $45 to $60 a day, double occupancy; each has its own tennis courts, pool and beach. At family hotels...
...beginning of the movies coincided with the ending of three historical moments: years of peace in Europe, the frontier era in the American West, and the time when explorers tried to fill in the blank spaces on the globe. As one heroic age ended, a new one began, with new kinds of heroes: men and women who wondered what might be done with new-fangled motion-picture equipment to record the fleeting reality of their time...
Stand on their own? The oil depletion allowance? Enormous public subsidies for the arenas their gladiators fight in? Soon-to-be deregulated natural gas? The Warren Commission? That's what I call standing on your own in a heroic way. Let's nuke it back to the Stone Age and start again...
...excels at capturing vignettes of that life--the celebrity fishing tournament, a Dallas businessman winking over hiscoke spoon the while his Mercedes is stopped at a traffic light. And Gent tries mightily to give the book some vision, tying his Neiman-Marcus set into a cocaine smuggling ring of heroic proportions, furnishing it with an ex-astronaut lackey who becomes the unwitting victim of his employer's pesticide...
Lemmon also notes that while he is "Diametrically opposed" in philosophy to the character he plays (a man who, until the end, believes that the system will work and that nuclear power is completely safe) he likes the character and admires him because of his heroic act that ends the film. Both Fonda and Lemmon say that the point of the film is that ordinary people, who fear for their jobs, who normally don't give much thought to politics, are capable of extraordinary action when they see something terribly wrong. As Lemmon said of his character, "No Caesar...