Cinema
Adventures
Ted Whitehead
Go Tell The Spartans (London Pavilion) We're used to movies preying off each other, but it's a surprise to hear a character describing his past in terms that recall another character in another movie. In Go Tell The Spartans (X) Burt Lancaster plays an ageing major whose promotion has been stymied by his addiction to booze and pudenda, and specifically by his affair with the promiscuous wife of an alcoholic general. Is this the sergeant who loved'Deborah Kerr an eternity ago? But didn't the sergeant die at Pearl Harbor? Perhaps the major met her before the sergeant. Perhaps there were simply a lot of promiscuous wives of alcoholic generals. Perhaps Montgomery Clift will appear. No, he is dead — while these characters, though not dead, were never alive.
Penang, South Vietnam, 1964. Major Barker, the weary he-man, commands a group of military advisors. (If this is what the advisors got up to, one understands the complaints made about the corn
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