Word: holden
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...Christmas Tree begins, dozens of eager French schoolboys disembark at the Gare du Nord for a ten week summer holiday. One little mop haired cherub named Pascal (Brook Fuller) rushes into the arms of Papa (William Holden) and Papa's fiancee (Virna Lisi). All the kids are happy. All the parents are happy. Even the conductors and porters seem happy. It can never last...
...exposed to a lethal dose of radiation from a bomb that dropped accidentally out of a plane that just happened to be flying over that solitary spot in the Mediterranean . . . Anyway, after exhaustive testing, it is determined that Pascal has only six months to live. "What?" yells Papa Holden in a frantic outcry against destiny. "You mean there is no hope?" "I would be lying to you if I told you that there was," replies the aging specialist, with a certain sober sadness...
...Holden stars...
...three principal characters (William Holden and Ernest Borgnine on one side, Robert Ryan heading the group out to stop them) are something of an exception to this. They seem to have more of ideal of what they are doing than the rest do, and Peckinpah shoots Holden and Borgnine in two-shot and has Ryan made up to look like Holden. They alone fight for dominance of the frame once the battle has begun, but they too are overcome once the battles get fully underway...
...three principals. It brings us closer to blood which, after all, is the fundamental element of life. It is not, as the final track to a high angle demonstrates, a liberating force. This force of beauty is one which will not let go. At the end of the film Holden and Borgnine are dead and Ryan is left to become part of a revolution which has no meaning...