Word: pontecorvo
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Treason has many faces, and most of them are familiar to Dame Rebecca West. Her studies of such traitors as Lord Haw-Haw, Klaus Fuchs, Pontecorvo and the Rosenbergs, explored the wide range of motives that can impel a man to betrayal. Sometimes, as in the case of Lord Haw-Haw or Fuchs, the traitor is distinguished from the patriot mainly by a loyalty turned upside down. Sometimes the reason is outside compulsion: John Vassall, a homosexual in the British embassy in Moscow, claimed that he turned informer under threat of exposure by the Russians...
...Battle of Algeria, Gillo Pontecorvo's earnest, overlong semi-documentary about the bitter struggle for Algerian independence, impressed the judges so much that they awarded it the festival's Gold Lion, even as it outraged the touchy French. Fahrenheit 451 earned quieter but more general appreciation. Directed by France's gifted Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim) and blessed by the presence in the leads of Julie Christie and Oskar Werner, Fahrenheit is a Ray Bradbury story that takes a disturbing look at a future world in which the printed word is forbidden and every last book...
...Communists for ideological reasons. The Communist "network of perceptions and association and interpretations," she writes, "made the Nazi-Fascists seem like hogs rooting among the simple, unimproved beech mast of the world." She also makes the cogent point that the well-publicized flights from England of Spies Bruno Pontecorvo, Burgess and McLean were deliberately contrived by Moscow to destroy U.S. confidence in England and sow disunity among the allies...
Kapo examines in excruciating detail the plight of women prisoners in a Polish concentration camp during World War II. Like all recitals of Nazi horrors, this Italian-made film, dubbed in English, is often stark and terrifying, and Director Gillo Pontecorvo gives his best scenes a look of grainy newsreel authenticity: half-frozen women laying railroad ties gaze hopelessly at wisps of smoke coming from a heated glass shed; the prisoners primp for a ghastly fitness inspection in which signs of illness, or too many grey hairs, can spell the difference between life and death; or they stand...
...Italy, where he was to join his former boss, Thomas Galbraith, who had been Civil Lord of the Admiralty until three years ago. Then, said Macmillan, recalling the case of a nuclear physicist who defected to Russia by way of Italy in 1950, Vassall supposedly planned to "do a Pontecorvo." Moreover, "the clear implication" of the story was that Galbraith "also intended to defect to Russia or to assist Vassall...