Word: soldiers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...basic setting and action has potential. Louis Malle (Phantom India) and Jean Renoir (The River), along with Satyajit Ray and his Apu trilogy, have shown that India's culture is fascinating on film. And Kon Ichikawa made a brilliant Japanese film called The Burmese Harp about a soldier burying the unknown dead after the World War II defeat, giving the story of a religious ascetic roaming the countryside incredible resonance and conviction...
There is the essence of a very fine interpretation of Macbeth's relation to Lady M. here, but it tends to get trampled underfoot as the play progresses, largely due to lack of clarity in Marianna Houston's over-strident presentation of the queen's role. The returning soldier clasps his wife passionately to him, and we have a fairly good idea how she might be persuasive with him, but too many chances to confirm this in the dialogue are missed. There is a power in such moments as when Macbeth roughly rubs his lady's belly with the words...
Falk tells these stories, or others about his adventures making Italian potboilers (an Italian producer once hired him by mistake to play a tall, blond soldier) with graphic glee, acting out all the parts as he goes. About his private life he is more reticent. He concedes that he is partly akin to Columbo. "I'm a worrier, I'm not the neatest guy in the world, I'm obstinate-but I'm not as clever as Columbo...
...other stories in the collection particularly stand out. "Prime Evening Time" deals with a Pentagon staff aide, once a war hero, and his appearance on television. Expected by his superiors to be a good p.r. man and expected by the television crew to be a living stereotype, the career soldier becomes an enigmatic distant figure, while ambiguous suggestions about his marriage fail to shake his privacy...
What, finally, do all these plots have in common? Survival. As the lost soldier, as the wandering Jew, as the middle-class American who finds himself unexpectedly at the point of no return, Benny Beer is a combatant whose dog tags do less to establish his identity than to signal the fact that he is in a war to the death. As a 20th century man, Beer, even in peace, is a sort of P.O.W. Even at home he is a refugee Becker is given to spells of rhetoric and eccentric time skips. But in the end this very raggedness...