Word: makes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...portrays Virgil Starkwell, a man who would get flustered crossing the street, and imbues him with the delusion that he can master the split-second timing, minute detail and cool bravado needed to become a successful bank robber. Result: a criminal so consistently inept that he fails even to make the Ten Most Wanted list...
...that Allen's pistol hand is a gleaming blob of soap bubbles. And so it goes, with sight gags interspersed with word foolery. The offbeat one-liner is Allen's comic forte, as when he speaks of a girl he was once fond of: "I used to make obscene telephone calls to her, collect." That might not be great comic writing, but it is good enough to take the money...
...screenplay is full of ominous undertones and pauses that are often more leaden than loaded. Although Frankenheimer's direction is always precise and often-as in the skydiving sequences-masterly, much of the dialogue lacks the painful intensity that was obviously intended. The interrelationships of the characters make sense but have little emotional resonance, a handicap that only Gene Hackman manages to surmount. His brassy characterization of a free-living sky diver adds a poignant dimension of reality to a film that, like sky diving itself, is an exciting but slightly dubious exercise...
...course, Vadinho could not make his way back from the blue except in a land as saturated with voodoo and ghostly candomblé rituals as Bahia. "God is fat," he confides to Dona Flor. He came back, he adds, because, despite her love for Dr. Teodoro, she called him. She cannot deny it, nor can she bring herself to send him packing back to his corpulent deity...
...permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat," remarks Flashman with customary charity. "We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again." At his best when savaging real people and slinking through real events. Flashman keeps his narrative moving smartly. Perhaps to make room for other sorts of depravity, sex is at a happy minimum, though he does deal out the Kama Sutra ("It is all nonsense, for the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed...