Word: mud
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Attack! (United Artists) pictures a blood-and-mud Bill Mauldin war without the saving grace of Mauldin's humor. A beat-up infantry company attached to a National Guard division is fighting its way across Belgium and taking heavy losses because of the cowardice of its captain (Eddie Albert). After one disastrous assault, Lieuts. Jack Palance and William Smithers turn mutinous, but are pacified when Battalion Commander Lee Marvin (who is protecting Eddie Albert to advance his own postwar political career back in the States) assures them that the company is being withdrawn from the front...
...wrong, of course. The German breakthrough in the Ardennes requires that the company be flung into the breach. Captain Albert once more fails. The film ends in a woolly Walpurgisnacht in which Palance, after slaughtering quantities of Nazis, is ground into the mud by an enemy tank while Albert alternately cowers in bed and runs berserk with a submachine gun until finally shot dead in a cellar by Smithers, who then nobly surrenders...
...light on bayonets. Director King Vidor has a master's hand with the steady, drumbeat assault of infantry battalions and the wild, wind-whipped charge of cavalry. He is even better in tracing the terrible retreat of Napoleon's Grande Armee from Moscow as it drowns in mud, freezes stiff in blizzards, and curls like a dying snake across a winter landscape as desolate as the ninth ring of Hell...
Belgrave and his bride arrived in March 1926, found Bahrein a feudal and impoverished place. Manama, the crumbling mud capital, did not even have its own water supply. (Water brought from the mainland by ship was hawked through filthy streets in goatskin bags.) The populace, illiterate, diseased and unruly, was forever trying to overthrow the Sheik. The police, imported from Muscat on the Arabian coast, were, if anything, even less law-abiding...
...pure sport. People don't recognize sport unless it comes with a standard label. Some people tickle minnows; others have jeeps. Why do we do it? Every Saturday you have thousands of guys kicking themselves up a football field. In the end they're covered with mud or in a hospital. Nobody asks them why they do it. Barring other income, I have enough now so that then I get back to Montreal I'll have just enough for fare home to Australia. At the end, a football player has enough to cart himself and his bruises...