Word: kwai
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Small lives are not the stuff of spectacle. They are not performed on a vast screen to the fife and drum of a Colonel Bogey March. Unfortunately, Director David Lean seems to have become so obsessed with historical immensity (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) that he has lost the capacity to focus on the troubled existence of ordinary people. The loss is plain in his wide-screen nightmare, Ryan's Daughter...
...island in the South Pacific. The cynic-in-residence is a cool-eyed cockney medic (Michael Caine), who alternates between bandaging the wounded and needling his commander. A reluctant Japanese-language specialist seconded from the American Navy (Cliff Robertson) is straight out of The Bridge on the River Kwai; he becomes the company pragmatist who is determined only to save his own neck. The rest of the motley crew consists of bellyaching foot soldiers (Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser, Lance Percival, Percy Herbert) whose only function is to keep the humor flying by calling each other "nits" and "fairies...