Word: raf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that she is able to count in English. Eighteen of the pilots are Rhodesian and South African, all clad in the uniform of the British colonial in Africa: highly polished shoes, long socks, neatly pressed shorts and starched bush jackets. Carefully holding themselves apart are several ex-RAF types, moustached and bearded, who punctuate their clipped, casual conversation with dated bits of Battle of Britain slang like "wack-o," "bang-on," "piece of cake...
Jean resists the lecherous counsel of Mama and her sponging stepfather (played with gusto by Raf Vallone) but finds a friend in kindly Arthur Landau (Red Buttons), the actors' agent who in real life raked up most of the muck packed into Shulman's scurrilous bestseller. "You have the body of a woman and the emotions of a child," Landau tells her. Soon Jean's reputation is made by a ruthless producer whose playbuoyant lair features a bedroom equipped with a Roman-size bath, a circular bed, mirrors, and an adjoining jungle paradise with torrential downpours...
Surprisingly, the acting in this otherwise total mess is decent. Carol Baker chose to play Harlow as a bewildered little girl, though with a woman's anger, and she is the only truly pleasing part of the movie. Raf Vallone and Anglea Lansbury make convincing parents, and Michael Connors is a charming man-who-Harlow-didn't-marry. Only Red Buttons, as Arthur Landua, really stinks...
...this time, and that means plenty is going to happen, none of it original. The characters, except for a regulation Blimp (Stewart Granger), are stir-type stereotypes: a bomb-tossing boyo (Mickey Rooney) from the I.R.A., a Little Caesar (Raf Vallone) with eyes that smoke like gun barrels, a twitchy-faced psychopath (Henry Silva) so hipped on homicide that he murders babies when he runs out of adults. What's more, the plot is a weary old war horse: the villainous heroes, who fight at the start to save their own skins, fight to the finish to save...
During this pre-Doomsday chaos Peter Sellers, as Strangelove, converts an ingenious farce into a great social commentary. Playing his usual three roles, Sellers competently portrays an RAF Captain and President Muffley. But his Strangelove surpasses anything he has ever done. The doctor, a nuclear specialist and a former Nazi, sits silently in his wheelchair through eighty minutes of tension in the War Room. Then, five minutes before the world and the movie end, Strangelove bursts into sadistic glee. He spits out macabre suggestions for preserving human life in mine shafts, smiles hideously behind his dark glasses, clicks his teeth...