Word: discreetly
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Alan Pakula is a discreet stylist whose best movies (Klute, The Parallax View) find silky danger in the most commonplace phrases and gestures. But there were problems in adapting Styron's tale, to which Pakula deferred in his dogged fidelity to the book. For one thing, the choice Sophie must make takes place years before the main story begins; so the film must switch tracks halfway through for a half-hour flashback to a Nazi death camp. Though the sequence is as strong and beautifully detailed as the rest of Pakula's work, the events it depicts could...
...plea from Argentina's military rulers was a strange one, and bore signs of more than a little desperation. In a discreet radio and television announcement, the junta that has ruled the country since 1976 urged Argentine civilians to show "greatness of spirit," "patriotism" and "definitive national unity." Then the military government itemized a list of 15 topics on which it would like to see concertación (understanding) with local politicians, union leaders and perhaps even the Roman Catholic Church before the government fulfills a promise to return the nation to civilian rule in March 1984. The list...
...time to blow away some of the smoke and tell his own story. His autobiography, which he aptly titles Confessions of an Actor, Laurence Olivier, came out in Britain in October and will be published in the U.S. next month (Simon & Schuster; $16.95). Sometimes embarrassingly frank, other times disappointingly discreet, it is, from beginning to end, always Olivier. He turned down would-be collaborators, like the late Critic Kenneth Tynan, and began work with a ghost. But after talking into a tape recorder for 30 or 40 hours, he took charge, as he usually does, and wrote everything himself...
Sensing the danger, the Chinese have used the recent visits of Nixon in September and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in early October to send discreet positive signals back to Washington. Nixon and Kissinger were both told repeatedly by the top Chinese leaders that there is no need for concern about Ilyichev's return to Peking. Deng said that "no real and fundamental improvement in Sino-Soviet relations" was possible until the U.S.S.R. had met three conditions. The Soviets must pull out of Afghanistan, which shares a narrow border with China. Moscow must end its support for Viet...
...Since there is nothing discreet or temporary about the Soviet military presence in the region, why must the U.S. keep such a low profile? Because, Qaboos says, "there is a basic difference between us and those countries where the Soviets have permanent bases. In some places, the Soviets are there by means of occupation. In others, the regimes give their people no say. By contrast, we have our own system that, like your system of democracy, does not let us do things that people would not want us to do. I am not saying there should be complete secrecy. That...