Word: orphaned
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...decades, of all the boys except two brothers whose determination to outlast each other provides the plot for the next two hours. The absurdity and delicious macabre blend of this premise might have made a first-rate English film. What results, however, is a superficial humorless mishmash of plotting orphan descendants, ridiculous Victorian satire, and cliche mixups...
...they are given little enough to do. Most of the action is centered around miscast, awkward, misty-eyed Michael Caine whose guardian is one of the brothers (you may have liked him in The Ipcress File but wait till you see him now) and his courtship with an orphan whose guardian is the other surviving brother. In an eminently forgettable role, she is a caricature of supposed Victorian modesty (her cousin's hobby of collecting eggs is deemed "obscene" and she practically faints when Caine, a medical student, informs her that his great interest is the human body...
...plot is another sack of potatoes, however. The heroine (Sarah Miles) is a Hibernian Orphan Annie who in rapid succession sees the young man she loves run away to sea, gets pregnant by a beastly Britisher, suffers a miscarriage in a London gutter, hurries home to find the young man she loves engaged to another girl, winds up on Christmas morning bravely smiling through tears. Her tears fall in such torrents, in fact, that viewers may wonder why the camera was not equipped with windshield wipers. They may also wonder how Director Desmond Davis and Novelist-Scriptwriter O'Brien...
...Sangre de Cristo mountains. So Miguel waits, but not idly, for his time to come. And for the viewer, months shrink into moments full of rich detail. Miguel encounters and narrowly escapes a rattlesnake, goes with his brother on a hunt for a predatory bobcat, adopts a newborn orphan during the hectic lambing season of spring, rescues a flock of strays from a snarling wolf pack. Perhaps the most rewarding adventure of all is the boy's first day of real work when the shearers come, his triumph when he is invited to leave the waiting women and children...
...Harold Wilson, at 50 the youngest P.M. of the century, is referred to as "good old 'arold") and come from the ranks of the British lower middle and working class, which never before could find room at the top. Says Sociologist Richard Hoggart, 47, himself a slum orphan from industrial Leeds: "A new group of people is emerging into society, creating a kind of classlessness and a verve which has not been seen before...