Word: cannoned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Before official Washington could get out if town for the long weekend, Massachusetts' Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy set off a cannon cracker in the Senate that rattled the windows at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and painfully burned an ally 3,800 miles away. The Kennedy rework: an urgent appeal for the U.S. to step into the bloody Algerian rebellion against French rule and lend its weight to the cause of Algerian independence...
Kennedy acknowledged that his aim was to wake up the world to the Algerian situation. But his cannon cracker had done more than that. By sorely annoying the hard-pressed French and pushing the State Department into a position that sorely annoyed Africans and Asians, it seemed to have been all bang and no benefit...
Goatee aflutter, walrus mustache aquiver, Colonel Harrison Gray Otis, 48, late of the Union Army and-in 1886-editor of the Los Angeles Times (circ. 2,500), fired his editorial cannon ball into the boom-frantic town by the Pacific. To the pueblo settlement seething with rainbow chasers, this shot barked out a gruff prophecy: thenceforward, the Times and her guardians would man the lanyard of Los Angeles' destiny...
Napoleon's occupation forces. The cannon, a beautiful three-ton jewel of muzzle-loading artillery, falls into the hands of an illiterate guerrilla chieftain (Frank Sinatra) after being abandoned by Spain's routed army regulars. Sharing his ordeal of moving the gun overland, through French-commanded passes and along sen-tried back roads, is a weird ally, a spick-and-span British navy gunnery expert (Gary Grant), who, believing that war is a gentleman's affair, is appalled by the barbaric tactics of Sinatra's uncouth band. Italy's Sophia Loren, as a busty errand...
...curse of unrestrained bigness. Mightily successful as sheer spectacle. The Pride almost succeeds in personalizing its heroics, but its humans tend to get lost in what amounts to runaway mass movement. Not so strangely, the movie's true hero and source of its emotional appeal is a monster cannon whose ornate bronze undergoes triumphs and mortifications that flesh could never endure...