Word: fiascos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Fiasco in Milan. Italy's Carlo Pisacane is a 72-year-old comedian who portrays a sadly dilapidated object called The Little Shack (Capannelle). Capannelle stands 5 ft. 4 in., weighs 132 Ibs., and looks like Jimmy Durante trying to look like Mohandas Gandhi. He has the innocence of Durante, the gentleness of Gandhi, and a stupidity that is all his own. He swaggers about the slums of Rome in what he demurely describes as "sportswear": moldy sneakers, maggoty jodhpurs, a blazing blazer apparently made from an old American flag. His head sticks up like the little bald ball...
...feed his tapeworm, Capannelle long ago was driven to a career of crime. In Big Deal on Madonna Street, he became a notorious icebox robber. In Fiasco, a mildly amusing sequel to that uproarious comedy of criminal errors, the tapeworm is bigger than ever, and poor Capannelle has been forced to seek state support for a dependent he cannot declare. According to the script, he frequently strolls into a fancy restaurant, gums his way through an eight-course dinner, tsks at the check, turns out his pockets, toddles off to prison and a month of free meals...
...Fiasco begins, the old Madonna Street gang, led by Vittorio Gassman, latches onto a big deal in Milan, and Capannelle gets a cut of the caper-probably because he is willing to work for peanuts. Everything that can possibly go wrong, does. At one point, while Capannelle keeps an eye peeled for the polizia, another member of the gang steals a parked car, drives exactly eleven inches, feels a mighty thump, realizes red-faced that one rear wheel is gone-the car was standing on a jack. In the end, Capannelle & Co. cop the swag, a matter of 80 million...
...everyone forgotten that the Administration's excuse for the Bay of Pigs fiasco was that the Cubans must fight their own war without direct U.S. involvement? Now that they are attempting to do so, the Cubans are thwarted at every turn by the same U.S. Government that betrayed them before but promised all support short of direct involvement...
...early days of the New Frontier. Chester Bowles was a conspicuous and important man-Under Secretary of State and an insider in major White House foreign policy decisions. But after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, ex-Adman Bowles aroused Kennedy's anger by telling newsmen that he had disagreed with the invasion plans. For that mixture of indiscretion and disloyalty. Kennedy dropped Bowles from his No. 2 post in the State Department and gave him a new job that was long on title-the President's Special Representative and Adviser on African, Asian and Latin American Affairs...