Word: defectiveness
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When Soviet Ballet Star Alexander Godunov decided to defect to the U.S. last week, he could hardly have foreseen the fallout from his electrifying leap to freedom: a Moscow-bound Soviet jetliner with 112 passengers aboard grounded for more than 24 hours and surrounded by police at New York's Kennedy Airport; top U.S. officials at the U.N. and in Washington getting into the act; the official Soviet news agency, Tass, accusing the U.S. of "political blackmail"; and Godunov's ballerina wife an unwilling hostage in the center of the turmoil...
News of the defection-the first in the Bolshoi's history-sent waves of shock and apprehension through the 125-member Moscow troupe, which included Godunov's wife, Ludmila Vlasova, a soloist with the company. At that point some ballet insiders reported that the couple were estranged and that Vlasova, 37, was unwilling to defect with her husband. Still, angry Soviet officials felt it necessary to hold Vlasova incommunicado at the hotel. Because the Bolshoi has long been groomed to be the showcase of Soviet culture, Godunov's flight was evidently viewed as even more...
...Taylor, noted: "The tragedy of this case ... is that Mr. Thorpe has been surrounded and in the end his career blighted by the Scott affair. His story is a tragedy of truly Greek or Shakespearean proportions-the slow but inevitable destruction of a man by the stamp of one defect...
...into a series of alternating smiles and frowns. There is no sense of emo tional conviction: it is as if she were making faces before an imaginary mirror. Too many years before the camera, perhaps, where her superbly expressive face, particularly her eyes, have been her fortune. A deeper defect is that she projects no wifely warmth or maternal affections. She treats Papa (George Hearn) like a stagehand who has wandered onto the set, and acts like a coolly efficient career woman with five pressing memos in front of her instead of five adoring children...
...mosquito looking for some place to draw blood. Maddeningly, the script offers a number of scenes that suggest an air of gathering menace, but it never quite manages to stitch them together into a tense line of force. Nor does it offer substitutes that can compensate for that defect-an off-the-wall characterization here, an unexpected plot twist there, a memorable line of dialogue somewhere else. This is a disappointment: Demme's last film, Handle With Care, abounded in all these qualities, even though it was complexly comic social commentary rather than a simple suspense story...