Word: anouilh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Waltz of the Toreadors (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Lucienne Hill) is an often hilarious French sex farce. As just that, it is conceivably the best envelope Anouilh has yet found for conveying his philosophic approach to life, with its bitter personal tang, its overprotesting cynicism, its disillusionment so dark as to suggest illusions once far too rosy. In Waltz, by reducing to caricature the romantic attitudes that get men betrayed, he more nearly rises to truth than when steadily whiplashing the betrayers. As Ring Round the Moon also showed, he achieves a detachment in a world...
...general chained, for all his infidelities, to the sickbed of a not-really-sick jealous shrew of a wife. He is equally chained to his high-romantic memories of a young girl he waltzed with at a ball 17 years before and who now suddenly appears on the scene. Anouilh's General St. Pe, a Don Quixote when he is not a Don Juan, needs-as he grows older-stronger and stronger rose-colored glasses, and is all the more romantic for the day-to-day realities of a vixen wife and two ugly daughters...
...there is Mildred Natwick, as the wife, gorgeously spewing bedroom billingsgate and hilariously shifting from an invalid's helplessness to an athlete's violence. But out of the mouth of farce-like cold water from the mouth of a fountain gargoyle-flows a stream of cold wisdom. Anouilh uses the coarse, truthful exaggerations of caricature deliberately to offset the genteel evasions of life painted in watercolor. The general's foundling son may just be the latest in a long Gilbertian line; but the Jostling father, the middle-aged satyr with his subaltern dreams, who finds it harder...
With a rumble of kettledrums and a flourish of flags, TV moved into the fall season. Curiously, the week's best drama was a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy. Jean Anouilh's version of Sophocles' Antigone was given a striking, modern-day adaptation by Worthington Miner on NBC's experiment-happy Kaiser Aluminum Hour. As Creon, Claude Rains was a fine old despot, and once even squeezed out a real tear. But Rains was all but overborne by the wooden acting of Hollywood Starlet Marisa Pavan. In the title role of the girl trying...
Kaiser Aluminum Hour (Tues. 9:30 p.m., NBC). Jean Anouilh's Antigone, with Claude Rains. Marisa Pavan...