Word: sprung
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Duel at Diablo is ostensibly a battle between murderous Apaches and a company of American folk types who are fighting their way with troops, ammunition and supplies from a place called Fort Creel to a place called Fort Concho. Many a sturdy western has sprung to life from such straightforward plans as these, but Director Ralph Nelson and his scenarists clutter up the spectacular Utah scenery with something other than frontier history. Clearly indebted to more current events, Diablo's wagon train carries two kinds of people: bad guys and freedom riders...
...dialogue is archly mock-Edwardian; the pace, trampolin-bouncy. The sprung rhythms prove complementary, and the cast handle the outlandish fool ery like seasoned farceurs. The show does have its slack and silly moments, but never when Paul Ford is dead center, deadpan and dead earnest, the dourest living master of comic mayhem...
...essence of all that was evil in Junkerdom. Tall and taciturn, a monocle screwed tight in one chilly pale eye, his boots gleaming with metronomic precision as he paced the stone floor of his cell, the prisoner never complained and never begged for mercy. When the gallows trap was sprung on Oct. 16, 1946, and Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel dropped to his death, it is doubtful that he had any regrets. Keitel had long before reached the end of his rope...
...ransom deals. Ulbricht & Co. prefer to tap the cornucopia of West German industry for trucks and spare parts, and coffee, butter and citrus fruit, which East Germany considers "luxury" consumer goods. With time, a pricing system has evolved. Young prisoners such as Zippel and Trochim can be sprung for 15,000 Deutschmarks ($3,750), while the dicke Hünde (fat dogs) convicted of subversion and espionage pull down as much as $10,000 apiece...
French Vice. The plot was sprung by his sister-in-law's sister, a Mrs. Donald Crawford, who suddenly informed her husband that she had been "ruined" by Sir Charles. What's more, she told him that Sir Charles had taught her "every French vice" and had persuaded her to play three-in-a-bed with himself and his housemaid. Mr. Crawford thereupon decided to sue his wife for divorce and to name Sir Charles as corespondent. Dilke duly protested that he had never laid a finger on Mrs. Crawford, but he knew that the prudish Victorian public...