Word: burtonizing
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...exulted a middle-aged Negro man. "Amen, amen," murmured an elderly Negro woman, tears starting from her eyes. It was 3:02 a.m. at a downtown hotel, and Cleveland, the nation's tenth biggest city, had just chosen as its mayor Carl Burton Stokes, great-grandson of a slave, over Seth Taft, grandson of a President...
...COMEDIANS. Graham Greene's Haitian purgatory has an excellent cast (Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov, Alec Guinness, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Ford) and enough transcendent drama to absolve it from its most glaring sin: at two hours and 40 minutes, it is too long...
...Power station brutally run by "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his swaggering Gestapo, the Tontonx Maconte. Eventually, Ford realizes that in order to survive in Haiti he would have to become a vegetable himself; revolted by the wretched beggars and savage beatings, he escapes to the safety of the U.S. Burton envies the American's innocence, but he has been affected and infected by Ford's passion to obliterate evil. Thus, when Guinness flees the police and appeals for help, Burton cannot refuse. "I like you," he says, surprised-"God knows why." Next morning the Tontons offer Burton...
...remarkable re-creation of a land where images of voodoo gods and the Virgin Mary are worshiped at the same rituals. The cast of supporting villains and victims-led by Peter Ustinov-is uniformly excellent. As a fading beauty with a German accent, Taylor is reasonably effective, but Burton, playing an exhausted anti-hero in the same style as his memorable The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, seems to have stepped from the pages of the novel...
Ironically, the film's most stirring moments are not its overheated love scenes but the brief encounters between Burton and Guinness. In one, Guinness, a short day's journey from death, recounts his wasted life of lies in a graveyard retreat. Priestlike, Burton answers the tortured confession with a symbolic absolution. At such moments of transcendent drama-and there are enough to make it worthwhile-The Comedians is easily forgiven its other sins...