Word: steiger
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...ever call them tattoos," warns an ex-carny roustabout (Rod Steiger) whose entire body is covered with pictures. "They're skin illustrations." The work of a sibyl (Claire Bloom) from some far distant future, the illustrations are animated auguries of tragic destiny...
France, 1952. The country has changed, but the sergeant is the same: a psychotic homosexual who hides his desires from the world-and from himself-beneath a barrage of bluster. In the title role of The Sergeant, Rod Steiger continues his obvious fascination with the deviate character. Where he was the screaming, mincing Mr. Joyboy in The Loved One, and a coronation of closet queens in No Way to Treat a Lady, he is here appropriately disciplined as the doomed Sergeant Callan...
...acting Swanson as if he were a stricken deer, is literally driven off-screen by Steiger's agonies. Twitching his mouth into a tortured smile, roaring with a rage and a fondness he cannot separate, Steiger makes the sergeant's internal struggle so fascinating that all other personalities seem superfluous...
Like many of Steiger's minor films, The Sergeant could easily have degenerated into a one-man show. Instead, it is a two-man performance. The second man is Director John Flynn, who, faced with a prodigious actor and an undeveloped scenario, has fleshed out his film with nuances. The barracks life of monotony and loneliness is depressingly acute; the local pay sans, whose faces are maps of rural France, give an extraordinary sense of locality to a story that badly needed roots. Unfortunately for the film, neither Flynn nor Steiger bears the antidote for the sting of predictability...
...Jason Robards Jr. narrates a documentary on the scenes and people celebrated in the works of Ernest Hemingway. The program includes readings by Rod Steiger and Estelle Parsons and a performance by Antonio Ordóñez, the bullfighter who was immortalized in The Dangerous Summer. Repeat...