Word: legion
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MANY NASTY THINGS have been written about Michelangelo Antonioni since his L'Avventura grabbed a legion of intellectuals and turned them into cultists in the early '60s--the backlash that follows movie cults is inevitably louder, bitchier and more memorable than the initial shockwave that turns a movie into a classic. For years, these two warning camps have made a lot of noise about Antonioni knowing that moviegoers themselves seldom rely on their own judgment but rather trust the deductions of those who are in a position to release periodic edicts...
Despite his ruthless oppression of political opponents, Tombalbaye was never able to gain complete control of Chad, a country torn by traditional religious and tribal animosities. Starting in 1965 and later with the support of the French Foreign Legion, Tombalbaye fought a guerrilla war against the Moslem rebels from his country's northern and eastern desert regions. The Moslems, who constitute 52% of the population, resented the political dominance that Tombalbaye gave to the Bantu tribesmen of Chad's tropical south...
...east of Saigon and threatening to cut links to the Mekong Delta southwest of the city. On the political front, there was no significant development. A lone, enraged pilot tried to kill Thieu, but there was no evidence that the President was ready to step down-or that the legion of his political opponents could agree on a successor. Meanwhile, for countless thousands of Vietnamese, as well as for the estimated 5,000 Americans still in the country, the overriding question was how they could make their escape before the Communists take control (see box, page...
...American Legion Post 19 in a blue-collar section of Somerville, Mass., the withdrawal has been the topic of worried conversation. "If the war keeps up, they may want to send more kids," said Joseph Bolduc Jr., who served in Viet Nam with the Navy and is now the legion post's steward. "We don't want to see any more kids go back over there." The best policy for the U.S., said Bolduc, is to "just do something to get it all over with. People have been hurt enough by that...
...highly as the Westerner, the footage is juxtaposed with a sequence of weeping Vietnamese as a body is lowered into the parched earth. Weaker still is the film's examination of popular culture. Clips are offered from the 1942 film Bataan, from Bob Hope movies and American Legion war games of the McCarthy epoch. These imply that motion pictures are instruments of behavioral conditioning: we fought the Viet Nam War because the screen trained us to hate the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril. The notion that films so easily mold an audience trivializes evil...