Word: scars
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...long to be tucked comfortably into a corner of the mind. Between the memorable images of self-immolating monks and returning American P.O.W.s, there stretched a decade of contradictory violence and rhetoric that splintered the country. Trying to remember, much less grasp, that history now seems like reopening a scar...
Nureyev's Valentino is mostly a credible performance, but he is no nascent film star. No glaring flaws scar his rendition of the silent film idol; he delivers a convincing Italian accent, and the spectacle of star-struck women clustering about this Valentino is plausible. The script wisely makes use of Nureyev's awesome talents on a dance floor at several stages, and the opportunity to watch him glide through tangos briefly takes one's mind off the film's many lesser moments. Russell did choose good raw material for the title character, but the script he co-authored with...
...split widens, the right moves into action. From "Radio-Lutèce," a pirate station in city hall, Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac, a staunch antiCommunist, makes an appeal to the nation to sabotage government policies. Confusion spreads. Rumors of a sugar shortage, concocted by conservatives hoping to scar the left, send housewives rushing to stores -thus making the shortage real. Giscard survives an assassination attempt. A right-wing general calls for "resistance" and goes underground. Militant ecologists, aroused over the government's commitment to nuclear weapons and power plants, kidnap the Defense Minister...
...Movable Scar. At a guess, it is fa miliarity with the social usages of his na tive England and the accumulated non sense of the medium in which he works that generate the affectionate, and effective, contempt animating the first portion of Feldman's film. Even when he and it move further afield, following the disgraced Beau into his North Af rican exile as a legionnaire, there's some amusing game afoot. Peter Ustinov, as a sadistic sergeant, is equipped with a movable scar - not unlike Feldman's shifty hump in Frankenstein - and the director has given...
...Legion. Shopkeepers in Menelik Square hope the legionnaires will stay on. "They raise hell in drunken brawls and bust up a bar now and then," says one, "but at least they spend what they make here. Most of it is for drinking or whoring, but they spend it." One scar-faced Legion major seems willing enough. He shrugs and says, "The booze and the broads are as good here as anywhere...