Word: dragooned
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Better our own system of individual private initiative, even with occasional inequities, than life as a "dreary procession of rules and slogans that dragoon the mind as well as body," with pictures of dictators looking from walls, and the "ever present aura of fear...
Girls on the Job. But these material facts of life were not the main force that sent 160,000 East Germans fleeing from their country this year. Under Walter Ulbricht's Communism, life is a dreary procession of rules and slogans that dragoon mind as well as body. At the Karl Marx Oberschule (elementary school) in Leipzig, kids are urged to keep an ear peeled at home for anti-Communist remarks by their parents; placards on the schoolroom walls proclaim "The Party Is Right" and "Struggle Today to Halt Atom War Tomorrow!" In the desperate labor shortage, tens...
Unfortunately, there is less to The Grand Maneuver than meets the eye. The plot is about what one would expect of an Italian opera buffa, and, despite the brevity of the film, one's interest in the story often wanes. The hero, Armand, is a philandering young dragoon in the French army who would undoubtedly swagger if Gerard Philippe had put a little more spirit into the role. Armand wagers that he can, before the company goes on maneuvers, "win the favors of" some young mademoiselle, who has yet to be selected. At the provincial Red Cross ball Armand decides...
...instead of just standing still and raising his eyebrows. Michele Morgan, the disillusioned milliner, was also rather static; it seemed that the director had instructed her to play a long-suffering, cynical woman, and that's about all she did. Brigitte Bardot, who appeared now and then as another dragoon's lover, acted like a high school girl in her first play...
Soon the backslid heroine becomes a famous gypsy entertainer, travels through Europe from success to success and from sin (Gustavo Rojo) to sin (Dennis King). Crowd scene follows crowd scene: theaters, bullfights, battles. She finds her dragoon again at the side of the "Iron Duke" just before the Battle of Waterloo, which is thrown in for good measure. In the end, of course, she goes back to the convent, and at this point it becomes painfully apparent that the moviemakers intend, even at the risk of sacrilege, to have their unleavened bread and eat it too. But after more than...