Word: instead
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...August issue, featuring a cover story on a TV evangelist, was to have been its last. Instead it will be the first for a born-again Harper's (circ. 325,000), the nation's oldest monthly, at age 130. Just three weeks after the announcement that it would fold came word of its rescue by a pair of private foundations...
...news programs. But the boycott fell short too, with France, Australia and other allies refusing to join. If President Carter thought the tactic would show the Soviet people the error of Afghanistan, he was mistaken. Today ordinary Soviets claim to see little connection between the invasion and the boycott. Instead, they blame "warmongering" by Carter...
Again, in the classic movie manner, the characters are drawn from different backgrounds. But instead of using these conflicts for comic relief or color, Fuller mutes them to emphasize the commonality of their response to shared danger. The only fully developed figure is the wise and weary sergeant, who is so resonantly underplayed by Marvin that one scarcely notices that the young men who group themselves self-protectively around him are not more sharply particularized. But that comes to seem a prime virtue, for character is something that is formed by experience digested, and there is no time for that...
Fuller's film is essentially a series of incidents. Marvin's squad hits an African beach defended by the Vichy French, and instead of facing a firefight, they find themselves making allies of these reluctant warriors. They knock out a hidden German gun in Italy and are awarded an alfresco luncheon by the women of the newly liberated town. They survive a German ambush and soon after help to deliver a French woman's baby in the tank they have captured. There is a weird battle in an insane asylum, and the death of a child...
...film is full of attractive young performers. And there is a low-keyed conflict between them and a faculty that is trying to discipline their exuberance without stifling their spirits. If the film had concentrated on that instead of on hokey melodrama, it might have been far more engaging and truer to life...