Word: alistaire
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WHAT TESS needs is an introduction by Alistair Cooke. He'd lend Roman Polanski's lush adaption of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles an appropriately ceremonious mood, sitting in his studio library, staring down his Coriolanian proboscis and solemnly intoning "Fate deals the cards with the deck stacked against you...and you must play out your hand. Fate moves you like a pawn across the chessboard of life. Fate..." In Polanski's hands, Hardy's tragedy is like an extravagantly produced episode of Masterpiece Theater, the sauntering tale of a country lass victimized by forces beyond...
...Alistair R. Walker, an astronomer at the South African Astronomical observatory, observed Charon April 6 as it passed in front of a distant star and blocked the star's light for 50 seconds. After observing the event--known as an occultation--Walker calculated that Charon has a minimum diameter of 1200 kilometers...
...customary with Alistair MacLean, whose work inspired the picture, there is enough plot for three movies, not quite enough characterizations for one. Fox, as a demolition expert toting around a suitcase full of devilishly clever explosive devices, does do his best to compensate for a cardboard part with another of his amusingly off-center performances. Shaw is hearty, as was his custom in recent times, but Ford, bereft of the kind of writing that made comic capital of his essential sullenness in Star Wars, makes one of the gloomiest central figures in the history of adventure films. Richard Kiel...
Indeed, the only wrong note was struck in the U.S., where Robert MacNeil was hired to introduce each hour, the duty performed by Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theater. Only after seeing MacNeil, who fidgets through his banalities, does one realize how artful Cooke's introductions...
...look much like a straight shooter, but Barbara Bach is playing a tough-minded Yugoslav partisan about to help some British soldiers blow up a bridge. The film: Force 10 from Navarone, based on a novel by Alistair MacLean. Says Bach: "I enjoyed being the only woman among all those simpatici men." So simpatica was Bach that the screenwriter built up her role. In fact, Author MacLean, on a visit to the set, showed some surprise that his movie had a female lead...