Word: rubbers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kris Kristofferson, a fine actor who has worked well with Peckinpah previously, plays the starring role of Rubber Duck, a laconic, independent trucker who leads a convoy of fellow drivers on an endless protest trek across the American Southwest. He is a typical Peckinpah hero, a macho embodiment of oldtime frontier values. Early on he hitches up with a Peckinpah heroine - a bitchy, citified photographer who is hungry for a Real Man. For some reason, Ali MacGraw has emerged from unofficial retirement to play this demeaning role. Peckinpah shows his gratitude by shooting her synthetic facial expressions in humiliating closeup...
Convoy's script, based on C.W. Mc-Call's bestselling pop song, rarely flirts with logic. The dialogue, which is glutted with CB-radio slang and western-movie cliches, ranges from the absurd to the subliterate. We never understand why Rubber Duck's nemesis (the congenitally irate Ernest Borgnine) is after him or what the truckers' grievances are. What's worse, we don't care. Next to this muddleheaded film, F.I.S.T. starts to look like a dynamic political manifesto. Peckinpah tries to enliven the nonsense with slow-motion automotive stunts and barroom brawls...
Actually, the congress accomplished one thing relevant to Tito's serene prospect. It rubber-stamped a revamping of the Communist league's leadership, reducing the party's presidium from 48 to 24 members and confirming Slovene Stane Dolanc, 52, as its secretary. Thus Dolanc was reappointed as a member of Tito's inner circle of advisers, and in the long term, he could be a possible successor. In the short term, the front runner for Tito's title as President is Edvard Kardelj, 68, preeminent among eight members of Yugoslavia's collective state presidency...
...There are no other big union contracts expiring this year, but several important ones come up for renewal in 1979. Among them are the United Auto Workers (with 800,000 members), the Teamsters (900,000 members), the International Union of Electrical Workers (200,000 members), and some 80,000 rubber, cork, linoleum and plastic workers. These unions have three-year contracts that now provide an average of 10% in annual pay increases, and White House officials hope to see the yearly raises cut to perhaps 7%. The Administration will have little hope of success with next year's heavy...
...imbue their boys with a "muscular Christianity" through spartan rigor in almost monastic isolation. Chapel at these Episcopal Church schools was required every day and twice on Sunday; supervision was so strict that at Groton, seventh-graders were given black marks for going out in the rain without rubber overshoes, and eleventh-graders had to ask permission to go to the bathroom during study hours. Then came the virulent student discontent of the late '60s. After some bitter rear-guard struggles, the schools emerged with female students (of the top schools, only Deerfield and Lawrenceville remain all male...