Word: caine
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cliched quotes strung together." A weighty interpretation is often provocative, even moving. But (the purist cries desperately), there must be a few subtleties of psychology or modernity that even Hamlet does not contain. And under the weight of speculation and experiment heaped on it by director Bill Cain, even Hamlet creaks...
...production's first big surprise comes with its Ophelia (Ursula Drabek), whom Cain sees not as a shrinking victim of cruelty and circumstance--the usual interpretation--but as a strong and independent woman. Creating this Ophelia takes imaginative line-reading, a good deal of un-Shakespearean byplay that never made it into a script, and some outright cheating--for instance, an extra exchange of "Ophelia!" and "NO!" as Polonius tries to force his daughter to tell the King about Hamlet's visit to her chamber...
...activity is contentious and acute. To an editor: "When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split." On James M. Cain (Double Indemnity): "Every thing he writes smells like a billy goat." On Somerset Maugham: His gift "belongs to the great judge or the great diplomat ... He would have made a great Roman." On John P. Marquand: "Beautiful detailed observation and the total effect of a steel engraving with no col or at all. I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday." On Hemingway: "I suppose the weakness of writers like Hemingway...
...title story, "Dead Man," and the deceptively titled "Pastorale" also have themes dealing with murder. Frighteningly, in each case murder seems to happen naturally, as though it were somehow an acceptable outlet for violent emotions. Only after committing the act itself do the characters begin to feel remorse. Ironically, Cain never seems to care much about the victim and rarely describes a victim's character. When he does, the victim usually comes across as some slovenly, mean person who was better off dead. In each case, the notion of the perfect crime obsesses the murderer, and in each case...
...herein lies a subtle beauty in Cain's work. His characters--the bums, thieves and lowlifes--all somehow share a common thread of dignity. They share a common conception of what is just. In the end it is not the authorities who step in and solve the crime, who foil the perfect murder. Rather, it is the criminals themselves, who, tortured by their own feelings of guilt, in the end find what little solace they can by confessing their sins...