Word: burtonizing
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Congratulations on John McPhee's cover story [April 26] on Richard Burton. I read it with mounting excitement-would he fall off the tightrope stretched between ruthless factual reporting and sensitive (and sophisticated) interpretation? He didn't; the subject was rendered in the round; and the subordination of the Elizabeth Taylor episode at the end was exactly right. Without either apologizing or moralizing, Mr. McPhee conveyed the pathos (tragedy would be too big a word) and the self-destructiveness (selling-out would be too small a word) of Richard Burton's career...
...note that Mr. Burton agreed to the story "on the condition that McPhee do all the interviewing of him as well as the writing." Perhaps the peculiar excellence of this article may be due to nothing more complicated than its being the product of one writer as against that of a committee of editors. May I suggest, tactlessly, that the "collective journalism" which TIME invented is sometimes inferior to the old-fashioned kind...
...worry about Burton. Unlike Cleopatra, the last scene will be tearfully happy. The end of the affair will come when the flick has been declared a smashing success; Richard will return to the legitimate theater; Liz will mark up another man; and 20th Century-Fox will gladly get its $40 million back...
...reference to your citation that "only four actors have played Prince Hamlet more than 100 times in a single production" (Irving, Tree, Gielgud and Burton), your reporter must have meant only in London...
Move over, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare, and make room for John McPhee. He well deserves a place among you, for in his penetrating study of Richard Burton, he has created a character in the heroic, tragic tradition of Prometheus, Oedipus, Orestes, and Hamlet...