Word: protagonists
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FROM WILLIAM FAULKNER to Harold Robbins, interracial sex has ignited the imaginations of American writers. The most popular of these works dealing with sex between Blacks and whites share a similar protagonist, usually a physically powerful but intellectually deprived Black man, who comes to a tragic end as the Victim of Society, headed for the electric chair or castration by a lynch mob for the alleged rape of a precious white girl...
...sadly turns out, Coal Miner's Daughter is not entirely immune to the tired conventions of backstage movie melodramas. No sooner does Lynn start to hit it big than the film ineluctably slips into the usual Star Is Born cliches. Suddenly, and with only the slightest motivation, the protagonist is afflicted by marital conflict, pill addiction, desperate loneliness and a nervous collapse. True, these tragedies happened in life, but in the movie they seem phony: Lynn's later personal traumas are not so much dramatized as displayed like flash cards for predictable audience response. As the screenplay loses...
ALBERT INNAURATO'S Gemini begins with a deafening blast of construction, a counter-blast of Maria Callas and a volley of shrieks and screams. The protagonist, Francis Geminiani, a Harvard junior back home in Philadelphia for the summer, leans out his second-story window, plants a speaker on the sill in a grand gesture of defiance, and blares an opera record to combat the 7 a.m. assault. This awakens his obese next-door neighbor, Bunny Weinberger, who throws open her second-story window and screeches at him to "turn off that shitty music." Besides, she yells, one of those workers...
...Innaurato brings us as far as he dares, never allowing the desperate actions to have physical consequences. The play does not resolve its problems because many of the problems are unresolvable, and Innaurato is too honest to fake it without telling us so. The fantastic ending, which allows the protagonist to fly out of the abyss he dug himself, sends us out happy, and does not invalidate the preceding darker moments. They remain suspended--like Francis and Bunny on their respective ledges--inviting our return when the play--and the fun--has ended...
...protagonist, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is Bob Fosse--no point in rehashing the one-to-one correspondences. He is a talented director/choreographer staging a Broadway musical starring his former wife, editing a movie about a stand-up comic, and indulging his active libido in assorted hopeful chorines. He drives everyone hard, but himself the hardest ("To be on the wire is life; the rest is nothing"), waking up with Dexedrine and cigarettes--a tortured, uncompromising bastard. He is also a song-and-dance man, who doesn't know "where the bullshit ends and the truth begins." "I got insight into...