Word: anouilh
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When Vadim tires of treating sex as a naughty joke, he pads episodes with excursions into screwball farce. Playwright Jean Anouilh's scenario seldom seems funny, perhaps because the laughs are lost in the dubbed English version. Frequent close-ups make accurate lip synchronization impossible, and the flat, disembodied voices set up a sound barrier. It is a bit like watching dancers whirl through a Viennese waltz while the band plays Yankee Doodle...
...good student until she was 16, but then she lost interest in school. Her father had forbidden her to go to the theater, but the theater was all that her friends talked about. One day she lied her way out of the house, went off to see Jean Anouilh's Antigone. "It had a tremendous effect on me," she recalls. "It was the first time I had ever seen actors, ever seen a real play, and I was overwhelmed." Jeanne eventually confided her fascination to her mother, who complained to a neighbor: "I have a problem with my daughter...
POOR BITOS hinges on the visceral French political sport of right-baits-left. With more intellectual acuity than passion Jean Anouilh goes back to Robespierre to perform a masterly autopsy on the revolutionary mentality. As Bitos-Robespierre, Donald Pleasence is phenomenally good THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT, by Bill Manhoff, is as timeless as a Punch-and-Judy show and as timely as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Diana Sands as a sexy pussycat who claws and Alan Alda as a bookish owl who screeches, fill the evening with good, vulgar, neurotic laughter...
While the play makes Maxime and his friends as mean-spirited as Bitos, it sides somewhat with the aristocrats. Those born to power may be corrupt, Anouilh seems to argue, but they know how to rule and they can dispassionately temper justice with mercy. But the arrivistes of power, the burning incorruptible zealots like Bitos-Robespierre, pursue justice so obsessively that they end up being savagely unjust. Anouilh masterfully unfolds the psychology of the revolutionary mentality, with its abstract love of "humanity" but contempt for individual men, together with the secret snobbery of the proletarian leader who greatly prizes...
...Anouilh perhaps distorts history by making Robespierre no more than Bitos. Allowing that the will to power may begin as a desire for social revenge, as Anouilh believes, even the monsters of history acquire the grandeur of history's stage. An evil genie cannot be reduced to, or explained by, the bottle from which it came. Anouilh's Robespierre lacks size. And if men are not all black and white, it is even more difficult to swallow Anouilh's misanthropic contention that they are all black and black, however wittily or trenchantly phrased...