Word: lucien
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fallibility of preprimary polls leads some to dismiss their utility altogether. Says Lucien Haas, an aide to Senate Majority Whip Alan Cranston of California: "The polls are absolutely worthless." That is an exaggeration. The real problem is that since polling can assess the views of a body of voters but not which of those voters will actually vote, a preprimary sampling is only an approximation of what is likely to happen. Any politician or pundit who attributes to such a poll more accuracy or importance than it can realistically have does so at his own risk...
...stallion like Bold Ruler is more accessible for breeding than the sires of a generation ago. Before the second World War, a few wealthy racing families bred, foaled, raced and retired to stud much of the finest American bloodstock. "Today," says Lucien Laurin, trainer of Secretariat, "it's easier to get better breeding because it's more of an open breeding market." The reason: the proliferation of commercial breeders and the widespread syndication of top stallions. The owners of Spectacular Bid, as well as Seattle Slew, certainly are not members of racing's Establishment...
...ends up living with Violet and finally wedding her.) Malle also has an acute aesthetic sense; his other films have been very painterly in their effects and often masterful in their compositions. But in his other films, the richness of photography served to evoke his themes. In Lacombe, Lucien, the pale yellows and faded textures reflected the sultry French provincial world where even fascism unfolds at a meandering pace. And in a sleeper called The Thief of Paris, the visual opulence and use of decorative objects created just the sort of decadent bourgeois dreamworld that Malle's meant to attack...
...with our cultural inhibitions about child sexuality what he did with the incest taboo in Murmur of the Heart. Or that with his genius for cinematic austerity he could have conveyed the every-dayness of this sort of corruption, as he did with the drift toward fascism in Lacombe, Lucien. In that film he moved us through understatement. In this film, he doesn't seem to have anything clear enough to understate. A movie like Lacombe, Lucien gave physical and visual life to the idea of the banality of evil. But in Pretty Baby there is never an idea...
...Pretty Baby should have been Louis Malle's masterpiece. The movie is the story of a child prostitute in New Orleans during World War I, and no film maker is better equipped to tell that story than Malle. As he demonstrated in Murmur of the Heart and Lacombe, Lucien, this great French director has a deep understanding of the process by which benign children change into corrupt adults. Like his old New Wave colleague, François Truffaut, he also has the ability to portray children on-screen without condescension or sentimentality. These talents are evident in Pretty Baby...