Word: gaspard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Night Watch. "I feel fine for the first time in my life," says the baby-faced young jailbird, Gaspard. "It is wonderful to be with men like you." The men it is wonderful to be with are four fellow inmates at Paris' sprawling La Santé prison. They eye Gaspard with suspicion. He seems too soft, too ready to please. He is accused of attempting to kill the wife who supported him while he dallied with her teenage sister. Can this fancy boy be trusted? His cell mates decide to risk it, and cut Gaspard in on their plan...
...mirror. A piece of a metal bunk serves as a digging tool. Two stolen medicine bottles filled with sand make an hourglass to time the long, seemingly hopeless task of chipping through concrete sewer walls and treacherous rock. On the afternoon of the last day before the escape, Gaspard is suddenly called to the warden's office. Two hours later he returns to the cells, insisting he has said nothing to betray his comrades, and the drama hurtles toward a shock climax that suddenly becomes less a saga of physical endurance than a test...
...last film of French Director Jacques Becker, who died shortly after completing it in 1960, Night Watch engages interest on several levels. As a straight thriller, it is taut, bone-bare, agonizingly suspenseful, and flawlessly acted by its leading players, all nonprofessionals (except Mark Michel as Gaspard). As a movie about prison life, it is authentic; La Santé's guards are not brutes, they are merely inhumanly efficient machines, trained to perform surgery on the contents of a food parcel, to count skulls in the numbered cubicles where prisoners contemplate their anonymity. As a meaningful human drama...
...Times he was early nudged toward the diplomatic corps. At 16, he interrupted Sunday dinner to announce himself an actor. His half-Dutch father shouted half-Dutch expletives, finally conceded that the boy could have two years to get solvent as an actor, but no more. So Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven Van den Bogaerde went down to London...
Anatomy of Power. But in 1572 the balance of confusion at last tipped toward a resolution-or so it seemed. France's most influential Protestant was Admiral Gaspard Coligny, a military hero and a onetime condemned traitor (in Catherine's vacillating France, it was easy to be both). Coligny demanded an immediate war with the Catholic Philip, and at the moment had the ear of Catherine's moody, weakbrained son, King Charles...