Word: arced
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...much of the film's allegorizing. Mohandas Gandhi was this century's most prominent saint. Saints, however, don't usually make for good movies at all--unless of course you happen to have one of those rare ones who appear in the midst of powerful human events. Joan of Arc was such a figure, as was Gandhi, the leader of one of history's greatest popular movements. The Gandhi Attenborough chose to depict is the Gandhi of popular memory: the holy man who shrewdly arrayed his moral power against a corrupt colonial regime. Attenborough ignores the Gandhi who while...
...changing of Parsifal from a man (Michael Kutter) into a woman (Karen Krick) at the moment he rejects the erotic advances of the temptress Kundry (Edith Clever). This apparently signifies Parsifal's transformation from a callow youth to a hero, as Krick's grim, Joan of Arc visage emphasizes. Yet the device, like so many others in the film, is arbitrary. Wagner's opera is merely a pretext for the director, a frame on which to hang a murky, convoluted and, finally, not very original cultural thesis. The performance is led with surprising authority and eloquence...
...black box with the antenna clutched by Mayer was a miniature radio transmitter fully capable of detonating an explosion. Although the blast from 1,000 Ibs. of TNT would probably have only scarred the marble face of the monument, it could have sent out a concussive wave creating an arc of destruction from the White House to the Potomac. Seven nearby museums were evacuated, and a White House luncheon given by President Reagan was moved out of the room facing the monument...
...rocket that soared upward from its launching pad in Texas last week was not very long (37 ft.) or, by modern standards, very fancy. The flight of Conestoga I, an arc 192 miles up and 326 miles out over the Gulf of Mexico, was perfect but fleeting, less than eleven minutes from blastoff to splashdown. The dummy payload was just a 1,100-lb. tank of water. Said Donald ("Deke") Slayton, the former astronaut who was flight director for the launch: "We didn't have a single anomaly in flight...
...eyebrow plucking, no glamorizing. It was a fresh angle, and it worked especially well in the wartime '40s, when frivolous excess was regarded as unpatriotic. The gurgling approval of the women's clubs and pictures like The Bells of St. Mary's and Joan of Arc were almost inevitable...