Word: sackler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...very title betrays the facile irony: The Great White Hope is a walk-on; the film, based on Howard Sackler's Pulitzer-prizewinning play, concerns the Doomed Black Hope. He is Jack Jefferson (James Earl Jones), a full-throated paraphrase of Jack Johnson, World Heavyweight Champion from 1908 to 1915. The last five supersaturated years of his reign form the basis for Sackler's fictionalized crisis in black and white...
Such clanking devices would have even seemed excessive back in 1870, but restraint is a word unknown to Sackler. Jefferson refuses a standing offer to take a dive for a white champ in order to cancel out his previous "crimes." In a final Meaningful Act, he even rejects his beloved Eleanor, whom he suddenly sees as an albatross. In a scene that would shame Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eleanor's drowned body is brought onstage, and the broken Jefferson capitulates...
...were once hawked in Paris. Want to see Pope Pius XII do something obscene to 6,000,000 Jews? Scan The Deputy, an original Rolf Hochhuth dirty history postcard. Want to see whites do something obscene to a Negro heavyweight champion? Scan The Great White Hope, an original Howard Sackler dirty history postcard. The theatrical alleys are getting a trifle crowded with these peddlers, but Ireland's Conor Cruise O'Brien obviously thinks there is room for one more. He has a marvelous name for a dramatist, and it is a far, far better line than...