Word: sailor
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...reached Capetown so weak that it took twelve men to lower and stow the big, billowy spinnaker. Between Capetown and Sydney the skipper of a French yawl and a British crewman on an Italian vessel were lost overboard in storms, and a Mexican boat suffered a knockdown. A British sailor drowned east of Sydney when he lost his footing and fell into the frigid ocean...
...first) the men decide to show him in cathouses and bars all the way up the seaboard. Indeed, sometimes the movie mistakes this for a theme--that he is growing up and learning the ways of the world ("Welcome to the wonderful world of pussy," says the white sailor, and maybe we are supposed to glow at the kid's pride as he leaves the whorehouse...
...dying military, then, is best documented when the context is the rest of American society. In an earlier day the sailors would have been symbols and heroes; now they're rejects and they know it. Here it's not Indochina guilt that touches them--the pain is that they wouldn't understand that--but they are puzzled and defensive in the real world. Maybe the most interesting scene in the film is when the soldiers meet some pant-suited women in New York who take them back to a dope party. The movie can't resist making them into religious...
...about three sailors with time on their hands. But possible comparisons to On the Town or Fancy Free end right there. The youngest sailor is on his way to an eight-year prison term for trying to boost $40 from a collection box belonging to the favorite charity of the C.O.'s wife. The 'lifers" (career men) who have been assigned to escort him from the Norfolk naval base to the brig in Portsmouth, N.H., despise their job. No one is about to burst into a carefree song-and-dance number in the course of such a journey...
...whore (well acted by Marsha Mason) does not, at least, have a heart of gold. What she does have is a consuming pathology that the sailor finds irresistibly attractive. If furies of masochism lash at him, though, they are not gone into. Cinderella Liberty wants to be cute and sentimental and tries very hard to turn behavior like child desertion into the stuff of melancholy whimsy. All during this gruesome exercise there are some sharp supporting performances, notably by Allyn Ann McLerie as a snippy social worker and Allan Arbus and David Proval as a couple of Navymen. James Caan...