Word: wilderness
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...Hole (Paramount), Producer-Director Billy Wilder's first movie since Sunset Boulevard, gleefully dissects human beings at their worst. The picture is clever, original, technically expert, and carries an occasional sharp sting of truth. But it runs a good idea into the ground and leaves a bad taste in the mouth...
...story's Wilder-style "hero" is an unscrupulous reporter (Kirk Douglas) who has been broken from big-city dailies to a job covering the humdrum local news of Albuquerque. Hungering for a break that will send him back to the big time, he stumbles on a disaster reminiscent of the Floyd Collins story of 1925: a cave-in has pinned Leo Minosa, owner of a roadside curio shop, deep in a nearby labyrinth of ancient Indian cliff dwellings...
Though Thornton Wilder is best known as a Pulitzer Prizewinning author of twelve novels and plays (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth), he has also pursued a second career over the course of 30 years. As a teacher, he has Cone from Lawrenceville School to the University of Chicago, and finally this year to Harvard, "continually drawing comparisons, not between institutions, but comparisons between something far more striking and instructive-comparisons between attitudes, tacit assumptions, the thought world of students that I have known throughout the decades of my teachings." At Harvard...
Three Assumptions. Wilder found that the graduates of 1951, "living in an age which has variously been called ... an Age of Upheaval, an Age of Anxiety, [have developed] resources that we in 1920 felt no need to call upon. Like species of the animal kingdom, they developed adaptations . . . three tacit assumptions . . . that we could not have grasped...
...Wilder interpreted the white whale as a symbol of God. Such a symbol illustrates the book's abstractness, Wilder claimed, because it detracts from the conventional father image. "There is a limit to which we can consider ourselves sons and daughters of a whale," he pointed...