Word: split-second
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Along the way, Rachel falls in with a crooked straight man (Jason Robards) and a doleful comic (Norman Wisdom). The casting could not be bettered., Robards' crumpled countenance and larcenous glint make him the quintessential backstage villain. Wisdom, long a British stage star, recalls Keaton in his split-second spills and deadpan pantomime...
...flew 90 combat missions in Korea, shot down one MIG and scored one "possible." On the first unsuccessful attempt to launch Gemini 6, when the Titan booster belched smoke and flames without lifting off, Schirra correctly decided that there was no danger of an explosion. He made a split-second decision not to damage the spacecraft by pulling the seat-ejection ring. A few days later, Gemini 6, still intact, carried him aloft to achieve man's first rendezvous in space...
Landing on the makeshift "flight deck" is a ticklish operation demanding split-second timing by pilot and boat crew. As a UH-1 chopper hovers over the mini-carrier, the landing area is invisible to the pilot, who must rely on hand signals from one of the boat's seven-man crew. Meanwhile, the boat's captain maneuvers his vessel under the skids of the descending helicopter. The air-sea mating has become a smooth routine. In more than 2,000 landings, there has yet to be a serious mishap...
...slapstick-coffin-lid play, unscheduled entrances, involuntary exits, stashing the money where the corpse was and vice versa. The macabre jocularity involves such bits of business as tossing the dead mother's dentures across the room as casually as a pack of cigarettes. All of this demands the split-second timing of a Feydeau farce, and unfortunately Director Derek Gold-by is no Mike Nichols...
...about who was the strategist behind the Communists' desperate thrust: North Viet Nam's Defense Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, the charismatic victor over the French at Dienbienphu in 1954 and creator of the North Vietnamese army. In its surprise, its boldness, the sweep of its planning and its split-second orchestration, the general offensive bore all the unmistakable marks of Giap's genius. All the evidence indicated, in fact, that probably for the first time since the war against the French, Giap was personally directing the entire campaign in South Viet...