Word: bernard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Naghten Rule, as applied to the criminally insane, has guided the hand of justice ever since. But in increasing number, lawyers and judges are wondering whether justice needs a better guide. Says Psychiatrist Bernard L. Diamond, a member of a commission appointed by California Governor Pat Brown to study the state's criminal insanity laws: "A person who is so mentally ill that he doesn't understand right from wrong would be a drooling idiot incapable of action." In the last century, psychiatric medicine has amplified man's understanding of mental illness to such a degree that...
...Bernard survives, however. He even lies to save her, and as Thérèse rides home from court to try to tell him why she did it, her unhappy history is reviewed in flashbacks. Here, the prose narrative becomes a burdensome, bookish device, but Director Georges Franju finds visual poetry in sharp contrasts between the gentle Bordeaux countryside and the taut, terrible stillness of Thérèse's face. Actress Riva never fails him. On her wedding day, "the wild force seething inside," she stands in church like someone paralyzed by news of disaster...
...Does Bernard forgive her? Never. In a final scene flickering with pathos, he breaks down and asks: "Was it because you hated me? You couldn't stand me?" Half-mockingly, Thérèse replies: "It was because of your pines ... I wanted them for myself. Perhaps it was to see a glimmer of uncertainty in your eyes." Author Mauriac, who wrote the dialogue for this first screen adaptation of his work, supplies no simple answer. A connoisseur of human corruption, he peoples his novels with characters sidetracked by evil in their blind search for God. On film...
IDIOTS FIRST by Bernard Malamud. 212 pages. Farrar, Straus...
...Bernard Malamud is a poet of the victim. Not the tragic or the hopeless victim, but the absurd victim. In his stories, fate is clearly placable, but his heroes never get the hang of it. They make fools of themselves instead, and, by robbing themselves of dignity, they become somehow more poignantly human...