Word: cracked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with ten South Vietnamese battalions to make a 250-sq.-mi. rectangle surrounding the V.C. battalions. While the perimeter formed, two battalions of tough South Vietnamese Marines came clattering in by copter to flush out the quarry. By chance, the Marines landed squarely in the midst of a crack V.C. outfit. At once they were in a furious firefight and the Marine commander stubbornly waved off U.S. artillery fire and air strikes so that he could keep his own men in close contact with the enemy. After 22 hours of almost nonstop righting, the V.C. broke off to slip away...
...Spot. That was also true of the National Guardsmen. The crack of a sniper's bullet-and sometimes simply the bang of a firecracker or the pop of a light bulb-brought forth fantastic fusillades from police and National Guard rifles, shotguns, machine guns and pistols. Four-year-old Tonia Blanding was shot dead in an apartment when lawmen saw her uncle strike a match to light a cigarette, mistook the flare for a sniper's muzzle flash, and poured bullets through the window...
...Crack the Whip. Deftly alternating fast and slow motion, blackouts, flashbacks and stop action (mostly eye-popping closeups of female posteriors and anteriors), Kelly in effect has choreographed the film along the lines of a fast-paced modern dance. He enlivened one terpsy-turvy scene, for example, by having Art Carney prance after his mistress like an oversexed peacock...
What he usually wants is another retake, and he is just stubborn enough to keep at it for hours. Says Frank Sinatra, whom Kelly directed in On the Town: "The guy just never heard of exhaustion." But he has heard about charm, and he can crack the whip without stinging the ego. When he teamed up with Jackie Gleason to film Gigot in 1961, the trade waited expectantly for the Great One to unload his celebrated wrath on the demanding director. Instead, Kelly had Gleason puffing up and down a flight of stairs like a trained St. Bernard and Jackie...
...beautifully described vignettes of rural France. The pair meets O.A.S. assassins and silky entrepreneurs, dislocated settlers and stranded Arabs. To Marcelle, these encounters are part of the breath of life, but to Nicolas they are increasing evidence that the world consists only of "mawkish absurdity and lunatic atrocity." His crack-up is inevitable and comes with measured solemnity. Each family confrontation-with his brother, who is a worker priest, with his doting father, his enigmatic mother-erodes a bit more of Nicolas' will to live, and so he kills himself...