Word: tinhorn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...accepting U.S. tractors in exchange for prisoners taken in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. The U.S. dilemma: a strong sense of responsibility for the lives of the men captured in the U.S.-sponsored attack as balanced against a real repugnance for paying ransom money to such a tinhorn Commie as Fidel Castro...
Despite the tinhorn sound of the story, the movie manages to capture some of the sad, tawdry flavor of tent-show revivalism. There are authentic twangs to the score, a sweaty, sensuous realism in the swaying backwoods crowd, and vivid glimpses of gnarled God-fearing faces in Grant Wood gothic. The actors are so good they sometimes manage to make what they say seem important...
...Marines, McKean claims, were a tinhorn elite corps until World War I, when Correspondent Floyd Gibbons immortalized the 4th Marine Brigade in the Battle of Belleau Wood. Actually, Gibbons wrote his flaming story in advance, was wounded by a stray bullet that cost him his left eye, and never saw the battle he described so vividly. Nor did he mention the other 20,000 soldiers of the Army's 2nd Division, who fought just as-bravely as the 8,000 marines in the French forest. There is no question that the marines displayed surpassing gallantry at Belleau Wood...