Word: fortnum
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...Fortnum & Mason is only the most elegant arm of this family's LONDON-based firm, which started out selling sliced bread...
...family that invented sliced bread. The founder of their retail business was a Canadian emigre, Garfield Weston, who created individually packaged loaves. His son Garry built publicly traded Associated British Foods (ABF) during the postwar years and acquired dozens of assets, including British Sugar and the luxury London store Fortnum & Mason. During Garry's 33 years at the helm, ABF's value soared by a factor of 30, and it is currently the biggest family-controlled company on the London Stock Exchange, with annual sales of $7 billion...
...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...