Word: flyer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...flyer, still unidentified, parachuted into a wheatfield near the town of Preist last Aug. 15. His parachute caught in a tree, and the flyer had a hard time getting down. A 74-year-old farmer, Nicholas Nospe, was working in the wheatfield and saw what happened next...
...crowd gathered. Crippled Peter Back, the local Nazi leader, rode up on his motor bike. When the flyer reached the ground, Back shot him in the head, twice. Back was shouting "Shoot him! Beat him to death!" The flyer was still alive when blond, one-armed Peter Kohn, a railway worker who had been discharged from the Wehrmacht, sprang from the crowd and beat the prostrate man with a club. Matthias Gierens, a small, hard-faced crane operator in whose family there had been insanity, crushed the flyer's skull with a heavy hammer. Matthias Krein, a home guardsman...
...farmer, Nospe, protested that the flyer was entitled to protection as a prisoner of war. Back snarled at him: "You can bury him and put forget-me-nots on his grave...
...problem is that of the wife and family of a flyer who has died in battle, the solution a cheapened form of the supernatural: the hero returns, visible only to himself, other friendly spooks and the audience...
...presented, the situation is perfect for an intelligent comedy of the same order as "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" or "Blithe Spirit." Th ex-flyer is guided back to earth by a whimsical orderly of World War I vintage; he jokes about the events of his other life; he cynically surveys images of himself at different ages and mental capacities. Everything is perfect for comedy except for the regrettable tragedy of death and its effects on friends and relatives...