Word: fortnum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Plarr (Richard Gere), as he struts his way through a small Argentine town near the Paraguay border. The handsome drifter, Plarr is half English, half Paraguyan and not quite anything. Although he'd rather keep to himself, he gets thrown into an inadvertant friendship with the English consul Charlie Fortnum (Michael Caine), and entangled by the demands of two old friends, now Paraguayan revolutionaries, who pressure him to help them kidnap a visiting American dignitary. Playing on Parr's apparent feeling for his father, a political prisoner in Paraguay, the two convince him to use his connections to determine...
While his friends play politics, Plarr for some reason plays the gigolo; he begins an affair with Fortnum's wife (Elpidia Carrillo), an unusual Indian girl who first caught his eye when he saw her working in the town brothel. The uncharacteristic obsession doesn't add much depth to Plarr, who seems as reluctant and detached from this involvement as from all the others...
...film has a saving grace, it's Michael Caine. As Fortnum, Caine plays Plarr's antithesis--a diplomatic has-been who is vocal, inefficient, frumpy and, more often than not, drunk. Fortnum's expressiveness is near-heroic beside the doctor's iron mask, but the endearing consul can't carry the film alone. Like the proverbial tree in the forest, Fortnum's sentiments flag for want of a receiver among the other characters...
...heeled and of sportive bent. The nation basked in the golden autumn of Pax Britannica, with almost nothing to grouse about but the grouse (not enough of them). For Americans who could afford the fare, the country was the social and cultural equivalent of a well-stuffed hamper from Fortnum & Mason. So is Mr. American, a splendidly entertaining English adventure novel of the old school...
...Libya. Arabs being all too visible in England, the royal heist is conducted by I.R.A. Provos, members of Germany's Red Army Faction and a karate expert from the Japanese Red Army. With some inside help, the terrorists penetrate Buckingham Palace in a captured Fortnum & Mason delivery van. God save the Queen...