Word: che
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nude Frontier-There is a kind of reverse snobbism in the theater these days in which the drawing room apes the gutter and nudity is the ultimate in chic. Such plays can be crude (Che!), deviant (Geese) or playful (Hair). For a good part of the evening, Oh! Calcutta! is diverting and civilized, though it scarcely provides the "elegant erotica" that Kenneth Tynan promised when he devised the show. Far from being a sexual stimulant, Oh! Calcutta! is an anaphrodisiac...
...regarded as a thinker," Chiaramonte says, "but as a father image he is very much present. The older generation of Marxists remains influenced by Marxist thought, the last philosophy with a consistent system. But youth is moved by Marx's call to action. Castro's Cuba and Che Guevara conjure up a romantic image...
...Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads," wrote Albert Camus. "The police, or folly." The men who made Che chose folly. As Scenarists Michael Wilson and Sy Bartlett saw it, the Cuban revolution was just a Caribbean comic strip drawn in that country's green and peasant land. Its luminaries, Che Guevara (Omar Sharif) and Fidel Castro (Jack Palance) are Batman and Robin in fatigues. Che formulates the plans with a marvelously worldly wisdom, Fidel dimly grins; all that is missing is a light bulb over his head. When Guevara decides to aim nuclear missiles...
...appearance, Sharif is astonishingly similar to Che, and Palance's broken-nosed, cigar-chomping cobra is as close to Castro as any American is likely to get. It is a pity that the actors could not grow insight or force along with their beards. Palance's circular hand motions and staccato vocalizing recall Cagney rather than Castro. Sharif's acting is not lively enough to be considered passive; his revolutionary ardor is expressed by a narrowing or widening of his large, liquid eyes...
Striving to placate all factions, the film actually represents none. One moment Che is a cultural hero; the next he is a messianic psychopath. As for Russia and the CIA, the film makes them worse than villains by reducing them to bystanders who have nothing to do with the central melodrama. The driven, half-poetic half-delusive doctor has become a worldwide legend in the past three years. Though his body was seen and identified, he is still rumored to be alive somewhere in the mountains of South America. If anyone doubts Che's death he has only...