Word: heroism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...their frustrating and interminable war in Algeria, where cruelty answers cruelty, and heroism has its ugly necessities, the French have found one continuing source of solace: the dramatic exploits of a tough, leathery colonel named Marcel Bigeard. The son of a railway mechanic, Bigeard was a humdrum bank clerk in Toul when he was called up just before World War II. Today, a weatherbeaten and wiry 41, he is a legend...
...Best Pal." Leopold seems to have an oddly clumsy, cloying sentimentality; in a gushing letter to Clarence Darrow, he wrote about the lawyer's courage in taking the case: "Nay, it is more than bravery. It is heroism." From prison he wrote a poem to his aunt ("Birdie, angel bright and fair. So sweet of face and white of hair"), and when he tells of Loeb's murder by a fellow convict, Leopold writes solemnly: "Strange as it may sound, he had been my best...
What is particularly amazing is this film's ability to create an authentic empathy for shallow flag-waving, and if we all know in our hearts that war is not glorious, and the Russians must know this most of all after Stalingrad, the vision of national and violent heroism still comes alive and intoxicating for the moment, even transplanted out of the culture that it speaks...
...never-ending colonial demands for independence, few things have so touched and intrigued Britons as the political yearning of Malta, the rocky little Mediterranean isle whose 320,000 inhabitants earned a collective George Cross for heroism under Axis air assault during World War II. Instead of independence, the Maltese under the leadership of fiery, 41-year-old Prime Minister Dom (for Dominic) Mintoff have asked for complete integration into the United Kingdom and the right to send three M.P.s to Britain's House of Commons in London...
...builder, and its destroyers, murmuring, for very good reason, "Madness...madness." Such fine touches of irony pervade the film, giving it a refreshing tartness that most war movies lack. Boulle has packed into his screenplay all the elements a good war movie ought to have: torture, escape, death, destruction, heroism, sacrifice, and so forth. But everything is seen freshly, with the eye of an artist instead of a hack...