Word: secret
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more intellectual -- and politically calculated -- than visceral. He does not seem as passionate about it as, say, his denunciations of the contras. One reason his support for a conventional buildup seems to lack conviction is that it runs smack into his penchant for holding down costs. The dirty little secret about nuclear weapons is that they are a cheap way to counter Soviet advantages in geography and numerical strength...
Twenty-five years ago, as legend has it, a genie with a six-day stubble alighted on Clint Eastwood's shoulder and vouchsafed him the secret of star acting: "Don't act. You're an icon, pal. Get used to it." The advice has served Eastwood well. From his starmaking stint as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns to this, his fifth film as Dirty Harry Callahan, Eastwood has built a durable celebrity on his unique brand of Zen surliness. By now his character need hardly cock an eyebrow, let alone a trigger, to send...
...about the genre he has chosen. Again, as with Shaffer, redemption comes from the marvelous acting of Felicity Kendal as an intelligence agent painfully aware of her shortcomings as a mother, Nigel Hawthorne as a wise colleague and, above all, Roger Rees as the defector, who is also the secret father of Kendal's schoolboy son. The spellbound joy and agony on his face as he listens mutely on the telephone to the voice of the boy he can never claim as his, can scarcely even see, is the finest moment of performance in London. It makes this sere season...
...Scrunching into a child's chair in an eighth-grade English class, Bennett speaks softly. "You don't want to scare 'em," he explains later. When the pupils' questions become too rote, Bennett teases. "Some kids asked me if the Secret Service was here. 'See that big guy back there?' " he says, pointing to a hulking bodyguard. "If you guys make a move for me, you're in trouble...
...awkward title says it all: the platform tries to meld the "competence" of Michael Dukakis with the "hope" conveyed by Jesse Jackson. "Restoration" can be seen as a small bow to the platform's author, Theodore Sorensen, who was John Kennedy's speechwriter. Sorensen's secret: exhausting run-on sentences that cleverly mask meaning with their painful paucity of verbs...