Word: battlefield
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...bulging catalogues describing?in Sears, Roebuck fashion?the products manufactured by their nations' defense industries. The limited-distribution, four-volume edition put out by the French, for example, promises that the MILAN antitank missile will provide "unrivalled firing power ... against the ever increasing number of armored vehicles on the battlefield...
...twelve to 14 hours a day, six days a week, the sergeants drill their charges on the use of such weapons as the M-16 rifle and the M-79 grenade launcher, and teach them how to survive on the battlefield. The recruits "attack" while machine guns are fired over their heads, are ambushed by a tear-gas attack and end up marching 15 miles and bivouacking in the field for a week. The men have to pass a final exam in combat skills. Anyone who flunks twice has to take the entire seven-week course over again...
...battles. The "fat clergy" cash in those victories as new ecclesiastical revenue. The Dauphin, of course, uses her to gain his crown. Keneally graphically savors the irony of this visionary innocent ("our little he-nun") ending up in the midst of disemboweled and headless corpses, moving from battlefield to bloody battlefield in the company of assassins, whores and lice...
...only enough background coherence in the movie to point out that this bourgeoisie (periodic cuts to the six characters strolling down a country road shows us how enduring they are) does mousy things with ferocious underbellies--there's a thin filmy gate between the dinner table and the battlefield. Which is fine and presented so pleasingly that the movie is worth it. But Bunuel is idiosyncratic as ever, and there are no Theones of history here. One misses his stories, his Tristanas, when life can float by all at once, the great old director filling in the details...
Saigon's reverses on the battlefield prompted President Ford to promise that he would ask Congress for $300 million in supplemental funds for new weaponry for Saigon, increasing the current $700 million already appropriated for 1975. Proponents of the request will surely argue that Saigon's shortage of ammunition and aviation fuel seriously hurt its cause in Phuoc Binh and will weaken its defense of other Communist targets. Administration spokesmen predicted that some emergency funds would be approved, but the heavily Democratic Congress, already preoccupied by recession, the oil crisis, and the confrontation in the Middle East...