Word: trouper
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A.W.O.L. is the story of a U.S.O. troupe drafted by army intelligence to infiltrate the island hideout of the notorious traitor, Alura. Alura is an old trouper herself with a weakness for show biz, and so does not suspect that the U.S.O. troupe is really there to discover how she has managed to kidnap and hold two thousand of our G.I.'s. In usual musical fashion, the entire cast breaks down into girlfriends and boyfriends. The U.S.O. troupe consists of three couples. Alura lives with her nearly-Frankensteinian lover, Max. Even the peripheral characters travel around in twos, and then...
...Lila Kedrova, the old woman mostly seems merely gaga. It is sometimes hard to determine whether her grimaces are meant to convey joy or pain or simply the frustration of an actress trying to find a part that no one quite bothered to write out for her. The doughty trouper Melvyn Douglas, playing her husband, seems similarly afflicted. Both performers are the victims of Lee Grant's direction, which is diffident and lacks both élan and a clear viewpoint...
...jokes flowing as his world collapsed like a burlesque banana's baggy pants. On Broadway, as incarnated by Jack Lemmon, Scottie was a sympathetic soul. With the footlights acting as a DMZ between character and playgoer, Scottie could be abstracted and romanticized: he was the fatally ill trouper doing one heroic final turn...
...What's more, they rarely know how entertaining they are. Nero, for example, when he entered his Golden House with its statue of him self, 120 feet high, and its private lake, observed: "At last I am beginning to live like a human being." Who but a real trouper could have come up with a line like that...
...trouper had no doubts, Nixon, with a shot glass of vodka in his hand, posed with Dobrynin for a picture, told the Ambassador that he never drank the stuff and declared that strength and reliability were the true ingredients of peace. Said Nixon: "Rather than this being a period with a danger of war, it will be the opposite." Said Kissinger: "The Soviets want a predictable Administration. And in a curious way, I think they want one that puts limits on them. Their system is not capable of operating under the principle of self-restraint." An interesting theory...