Word: cardboarded
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...need once and for all to get out of the Dulles mentality of the '50s, which sees the world as a giant Monopoly game in which the U.S. and the Russians buy, sell or manipulate nations as though they were pieces of cardboard. Iran was not ours to be "lost," any more than was Chi na or Viet Nam. President Carter is absolutely right when he stresses the limited capacity of the U.S. to control events abroad...
...audience. The lighting is, however, painfully predictable; Porter says "There was a flash of light," and, lo, a light flashes. As she talks about everything going black, hey, there just happens to be a blackout. These intermittent flashes light a set dotted by oppressive grey lumps of cardboard and paper mache which hang above the audience like dreary smog drenched clouds...
Backing up the scientific ranks will be 20,000 amateurs with cardboard-box viewers or aluminized Mylar screens sold at fast-food outlets. (Without such precautions, sun gazers risk damaging their eyes.) Some will even usher in the event at a roc-'n'-roll celebration on an old armed forces base in Rivers, Man. But the music may be dirgelike. Weathermen are predicting only a 77% chance of clear skies over Winnipeg. As for more southerly latitudes, even a clear sky will not be of much help; as one Winnipeg observer puts it, the difference between a total...
...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...
...trim the President's other sideburn," says a White House barber in a typical example of Backstairs wit.) Only a sketchy attempt is made to re-create the nation's capital during the periods covered by the story. The one continuing dramatic conflict derives from the cardboard characterization of a mildly officious real-life housekeeper, Mrs. Jaffray (Cloris Leachman). Other wise, the show's major dramatic scenes all too often feature medical crises, which occur as regularly here as they do on Marcus Welby...