Word: costa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Confession is the latest effort of the brilliant Greek director Costa-Gavras, who made Z. The new film is savage, methodical and painstakingly realistic; it is also static, relentless and thoroughly dispiriting. It closely documents the horror of a staged Stalinist purge trial, yet lacks the creative energy to convey the vibrancy of terror...
Confession has enough individual merits to redeem its overall flaws. Though their film lacks the compact literacy of The Prisoner, Costa-Gavras and his Z squad (Screenwriter Jorge Semprun and Director of Photography Raoul Coutard) are too subtle and ingenious to make anything conspicuously bad. The brutal indifference of lower-echelon toughs is conveyed with deadly certainty. The pathetic buffoonery of a courtroom defendant losing his pants is an excruciatingly effective touch of humor. Nor is it possible to fault Montand's performance as a Camus figure cast into a dialectic inferno...
...problem is that Gerard is only as lifelike as Montand makes him; his wife (played by Simone Signoret, Montand's real-life wife) is relegated to the unhappy role of two-dimensional superfluity. Indeed, Costa-Gavras' style is to present characters as metaphors for life forces, rather than as people. That was fine for Z, which was sustained by the suspense of its whodunit framework. Confession fails as a film because it is at base a stenographic document, meticulously recounting the liturgy of political confession without regard for its drama...
...years a special presidential commission studied possible routes for an Atlantic-Pacific waterway to replace the existing Panama Canal. A route along the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border looked appealing; so did one through Colombia. Last week, however, the commission recommended a 36-mile sea-level canal across Panama, only ten miles west of the present one. It will be able to accommodate all 150,000-ton ships as well as the U.S. Navy's 60,000-ton Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carriers, which are too wide for the present canal. The new canal will also have the potential...
Another source of malaise is surfeit with politics, a turn toward personalism. Says Thorn Pringle, 29, an Indianan with degrees in engineering and business administration now living on Spain's Costa del Sol: "I don't want to fight America's problems. I'm too busy with...