Word: babe
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GIVING has never been easy-as the Magi, those first Christmas givers, discovered when they arrived with offerings fit for a king only to find a babe lying in a stable. Still, in the early centuries following that birth, giving was relatively simple. It meant giving up, a giving away of one's self or one's worldly goods in imitation of Christ. The matter grew more complex under the Protestant ethic, when gifts were bestowed as a reward or incentive for good behavior. St. Nick was long depicted as a scrawny saint who Carried presents...
When in London, he puts up with U.S. Ambassador David K. E. Bruce; in Manhattan he lunches at the St. Regis with "Babe" Paley, wife of the CBS board chairman. And when time comes to cruise the Greek isles, he goes shipmate with Gianni and Marella Agnelli, Prince Adolfo Caracciolo and Kay Graham, the peripatetic but serious-minded owner of the Washington Post...
...Babe's cast sustains this intensity except where Sartre's shoddy dramatization makes it impossible. Deitch as the cynical, frankly self-centered, intellectual Henri is magnificent. His swagger is far more powerful as potential than as actuality. A painfully trapped man, he smashes into walls and writhes futilely when tied to a chair of torture...
...dramatist Sartre is pretty amateur. He gives us a trio of Vichy officers who are the Enemy and not much more. Ken Tigar and James Woods play two thankless stereo-types, and Dan Chumley plays an officer who has no dramatic or thematic meaning at all. Babe is uncertain what to do with them. They end up serving as comic relief, buttoning their vests to look presentable when a prisoner comes in to be tortured, or else being so evil as to be laughable...
Sometimes The Victors confuses you with details and the seemingly pointless fluttering of some thin characters. But this is only outside the cage. Inside, Sartre and Babe avoid allowing the lines of the play to wander off from each other and the result is a fascinating, lucid view of the tombless dead and the entombed living...