Word: wayes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Rope of Sand (Paramount) is Hollywood's flowery way of describing the prohibited desert area surrounding a fabulous South African diamond mining concession. Mounting guard on the diamonds are a shrewd, sadistic police chief (Paul Henreid), and his boss (Claude Rains), an elegant, cynical fellow who plays with human lives like a petulant puppet master. With the help of a luscious French trollop (Corinne Calvet), the two men are bent on frustrating the aims of a hulking American hunting guide (Burt Lancaster) who feels that he has earned the right to walk off with some of their precious pebbles...
Their plans, of course, go wrong. As soon as Miss Calvet, in a deep-chested décolletage, spots Lancaster in a sweaty, open-collared shirt, she is seized with a different idea: to walk off with Lancaster, diamonds or no. By the time she has had her way, the plot has encompassed a torture scene and the remarkable regeneration of the heroine. It has also been looped and twisted into a tricky knot of complications and double crosses. Rope, in fact, proves only two things: 1) given enough plot, any Hollywood melodrama can be counted on to hang itself...
...formula used in Everything is one way of doubling and tripling the number and variety of songs and dances in a movie without having to worry about whether they fit into the plot. With good enough air-cooling in neighborhood thea ters, it could also triple the summer till...
...devotion to the past all taken to the point where every human quality can become a vice instead of a virtue. So that, for example, humor becomes cynicism, endurance becomes exhaustion, arrogance blindness and the Patriot a Blimp. In other words Ireland is learning, as Americans say, the hard way . . . Ireland has clung to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe, resisting Change, Alteration, Reconstruction to the very last...
...French and raised his private horde of Swiss and Italian bandits. While his satiated father sat back weakly on his throne (some historians think, on the contrary, that Borgia senior was quite handy at murder), son Cesare stormed and conquered numerous fortresses in Italy. Men who got in his way were ruthlessly disposed of by his Spanish henchman, Don Michelotto, or quietly turned over to his bland and terrifying secretary, Agapito, who, in Author Balchin's version, sounds comically like P. G. Wodehouse's inimitable Jeeves, and who removes undesirable Borgia enemies as distastefully as if they were...