Screen
Westerbeck., Colin L. Jr.
more like a best-of-the-missed list, an anthology review of all the good movies around since the fall that I haven't had a chance to tell you about yet. In The Grey Fox, the actor and the...
...What brings the two men together is that both love a young prostitute (Elpidia Carrillo...
...It stops this incredible hulk dead...
...But by coming out of retirement to do this new movie, Connery shows he has Bond's own talent for the instinctively right decision...
...The dust in Anne's life in India is not only that against which she chinks her room in the dry season, but the dust of the past in which she pokes, and that of her own nature...
...He smiles, unruffled, and says, " i t seems we made the right decision - - choosing your room, I mean...
...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...She too has an affair with an Indian, but in a mood of listlessness and acquiescence, not passion...
...A few minutes later, as they lie in bed, a tremendous explosion occurs in another wing of the building...
...Sometimes, even he can't believe his own strength...
...Neither ever becomes a mere metaphor for the other...
...There are no missteps, no straining at the bit...
...The actor is Richard Famsworth, who has been a Hollywood stunt man since the 1930s...
...Both are women - - Anne (Julie Chiistie) who goes to India to learn about a scandal her great aunt caused there in the 1920s, and the aunt herself, Olivia (Greta Scacchi), whose story we learn as Anne pieces it together...
...The character is a train robber named Bill Miner who emerges from three decades in prison and goes right back to his old line of work...
...The journalists go from their private lives out into the street fighting as readily as the Nicaraguans go about their dally routine amidst the shelling, the patrolling, the door-to-door searches, the rubble of their country...
...The music falls on our Western ears with unfamiliar beauty...
...Scan Connery was the one who swore "never again" when he made his last Bond film before Roger Moore took over the series...
...Having at first been a drunkard and a cynic, the counsel ultimately becomes a sentimental fool...
...The love story and that of the reporters' coverage of the guerrillas run vaguely parallel...
...The counsel is a man who begins with no illusions and ends up with too many...
...Each l~nows the other's instincts and moods...
...Commonweal: 18...
...When the world around him disintegrates, he escapes into a dream world where cuckolds and their wives live happily ever after...
...Something of the special chaos of such circumstances is conveyed...
...Under Fire contains similar material - - an eternal triangle, this time" made up of journalists (Gene Hackman, Joanna Cassidy and Nick Nolte), set against a background of Latin revolution, the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua when it was about to ovethrow Somoza in 1979.The movie is remarkable, though, because the revolution is not just background...
...Anne and Olivia play a strange duet across the years, their lives calling and answering in counterpoint...
...Amazed, Bond looks at the beaker's label, which reads, "urine sample - - James Bond...
...What really compels her to stay is the heat of passion she feels for the local Nawab (Shashi Kapoor) with whom she has an affair...
...Farnsworth, who is sixty-eight, does all his own stunts in this movie, l i e ' s done them for others, like Gary Cooper, for as long as Miner has done time...
...The Honorary Counsel is what Graham Greene called the novel on which Beyond the Limit is based...
...He lives life backwards, and thereby survives while stronger men perish in a fiasco created by the terrorists...
...Both have been on the hard-scrabble fringes of a glamorous profession, out where the risks are greater and the living smaller...
...In Heat and Dust, the film directed by James Ivory and adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own novel, heat is the fate of one main character, dust the fate of the other...
...This slight incredulity at his own escapades is what makes Bond such a durable character...
...In The Grey Fox, the actor and the character he plays fit each other as snugly as a horse and a rider who've been together a long, long time...
...Greene's title character is a British expatriate (Michael Caine) living in a South American town to which there moves a doctor (Richard Gere) who is mixed up with terrorists...
...Farnsworth has seen the same side of the movie business that Miner has seen of the wild west...
...This has made him into precisely the steely-eyed, soft-spoken man Miner needs to be...
...While a patient at a sanitarium, he is attacked by an assassin into whose eyes he throws a beaker of liquid from a laboratory table...
...The only reaction even more characteristic of Bond than the savoir-faire just described is when he does allow a tiny hint of surprise to creep in...
...It's a story whose pessimism is curiously moving, almost poignant...
...Thus does the film avoid both the excessive cynicism of a movie like Circle of Deceit and the excessive romanticism of one like The Year of Living Dans In Never Say Never Again, James Bond enters a hotel with a woman and says, "Your room or mine...
...Olivia chooses heat as her fate when she stays with her colonial-office husband during the summer months instead of going to the mountains...
Vol. 111 • January 1984 • No. 1
