Word: shooting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...federal official, is the human response of a cop confronted by someone who has publicly vowed to kill him. "That's no plot," the official says. "It's a perfectly natural reaction by a policeman facing someone who has said, even boasted, that he is prepared to shoot it out." That, added to the perennial edginess of a white policeman in the ghetto and the longstanding and usually merited hostility of blacks to the police, makes cops confronting Panthers very jumpy men who take no chances...
...They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is a strenuous attempt to make that marathon a metaphor for man's fate. The contestants are the populace of a wasted nation. One girl, Ruby (Bonnie Bedelia), is pregnant. Gloria (Jane Fonda) is a brassbound bitch from the Dust Bowl. Robert (Michael Sarrazin) is an open-faced kid from a farm. Sailor (Red Buttons) is a Navy veteran whose ship has gone out. The man running the marathon-and carrying the movie-is a dime-store Barnum named Rocky (Gig Young). The son of an itinerant faith healer, Rocky has read...
...boardwalk and out of the marathon, she aims a pistol at her temple. Then, for the first time, her temerity falters. "Help me," she begs Robert, and Robert obligingly turns the attempted suicide into a murder. The farm boy's explanation to the police: "They shoot horses, don't they?" Yes, they do-but only when the animal is broken. As Fonda plays the part, Gloria is a born survivor, a cork of a woman who would bob to the surface of a sewer or an ocean...
Still, as a footnote to American history, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is invaluable. The entire cast-particularly Young and Fonda-understands the era when existence seemed one long bread line. The penciled eyebrows, marcelled coiffures and bright, hopeful faces change by degrees into ghastly masks; the bodies seem to pull against a gravity that wants them six feet underground. The music goes round and round, and so do the actors, in a coruscating dance of death. It is a pity that the picture is not left to them. The film makers should have known better than...
...GANG THAT COULDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT by Jimmy Breslin. 249 pages. Viking...