Word: arthurian
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...tale was of Roy Hobbs, a ballplayer possessed of a talent and an innocence that could only have their sources in the supernatural. In Malamud's baseball world, like Malory's Arthurian one, men are ever the victims; it is women who have the power to make them betray their best selves as well as the ability to inspire them to redemptive glory. In Roy's case, all unknowing on the eve of his big league tryout, he answers a mysterious woman's summons to her hotel room where she shoots him (with a silver bullet...
...lost. In almost all of his 17 novels he exhibited a fatal temptation to play the philosopher, to make a large statement. He described his 1950 drama Burning Bright, which closed on Broadway after only 13 performances, as "a morality play, completely timeless and placeless." He translated and retold Arthurian legend and once proposed collaborating with Director Elia Kazan in staging modern versions of Greek tragedy...
...eventually turned on Kennedy. The protests and violent changes of the time jarred loose and shattered fundamental premises of American life and power. From the perspective of Viet Nam in the late '60s, some of Kennedy's rhetoric sounded incautious, jingoistic and dangerous. The Arthurian knight talked about building bomb shelters. The extravagance of all that the hagiologists claimed for him now seemed to make him a fraud. His performance on civil rights came to seem tepid and reluctant and excessively political. Stories about his vigorous sex life, including an alleged affair with the girlfriend of a Mafia...
...Merlin, the hero is observed just before the Arthurian legend, when the world is a crystalline Stonehenge and miracles are the order of the day. His teacher is a sage (played by Edmund Lyndeck, a seasoned performer). The faun who haunts his dreams (Rebecca Wright) is a comet from American Ballet Theater. And his enemy, the wicked Queen, is Chita Rivera, a blast furnace best remembered from West Side Story. In the classic tradition, gorgon and wise man vie for the magician's soul and the privilege of influencing the unseen Arthur, the once and future king...
...cinematic overnight sensation whose second screenplay and directorial debut, the fluffy screwball comedy Arthur, grossed more than $ 130 million at the box office and guffaws of critical approval; of a heart attack; in New York City. A writer of TV commercials and sitcoms, he could not quite believe his Arthurian success, saying last year, "I haven't even started my next screenplay, and already it doesn't work. I just think I fooled them once...