Pioneering comedy writer Anne Beatts's take on a president who was funny without trying

“Hoffman is a patriot who has fought the Good Fight to waken his fellow Americans to the cor­ruption of their own tradi­tional ideals. Like Tom Paine, he is a classic example of philosophic and poetic drama­tist of public Ideals”

“The artiness of Coppola’s aesthetic ultimately becomes an ethic as Pacino, in somber profile, emerges more victim than villain, more a melancholy Dane than a bloody Macbeth.”

“The rumor had Nixon plotting to use election-eve violence as an excuse for massive repression of students and blacks, mass ar­rests, and suspension of Constitu­tional guarantees to keep the dis­senters behind bars... The rumor was really saying that a Reichstag fire was in the works.”

“Ten years after the American moon landing — 20 since Sputnik 1 — astronauts and space-race lore have receded enough into the past to warrant rethinking. Tom Wolfe tells the early space story as if it were myth, and it is.”

“He may, like Zapata, be that ultimate contradiction — a man 'of the peo­ple' who towers above them, a man in constant tension with his own myth.”

“Bertolucci and Brando conspire magnificently, some­times awkwardly, to create not just a film about an affair, but the affair itself — an affair which we have the option of resisting or ac­cepting on a gut level, and which like most affairs (and unlike most current films) is better experi­enced than written about.”

“Since 'The Godfather' is about as unkind to the Mafia as 'Mein Kampf' is to Adolf Hitler, it is hard to understand why the local little Caesars didn’t pay a commission for all the free publicity.”

“When the iron door was opened, sounds peculiar to jails and prisons poured into my ears — the screams, the metallic clanging, officers’ keys clinking. Some of the women noticed me and smiled warmly or threw up their fists in gestures of solidarity”

“Pauline Kael drifts away from a half-hearted analysis of 'Kane' to the most lively gossip imaginable about the alleged birth-pangs and labor-pains of the script. Bit by bit, 'Raising Kane' becomes an excuse to lower the boom on Orson Welles so as to resurrect the reputation of the late Herman J. Mankiewicz.”