Word: caligula
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...told that the mad Emperor Caligula once appointed a horse to administer an imperial province. The people of Brazil's largest city, Sao Paulo (population over 3,000,000) have easily matched Caligula's choice of public servant; they have elected a female rhinoceros as mayor...
Amid outcries about freedom, characters die as if it were the last act of Hamlet; amid tirades against power, slave girls uncover and Caligula runs wild. If there is a unifying note in all this it is that the characters, whether male or female, slave or free, vile or virtuous, slain or spared, are orators one and all. So much oratory has its touches of eloquence, so much theatricalism its flashes of theater. But the play as a whole is lumberingly lurid, and Alvin Epstein's Claudius offers some adroit stammering that is more effective than anyone else...
...girl herself is tormented and driven to drink by the swinish brutality of a man who Vidgren learns too late is none other than the school's "pet sadist," Caligula, who in turn is tormented by an epic inferiority complex, which brings out the classical beast in him. The tragic ending of the affair severs Vidgren's educational umbilical cord and sends him out into the invigorating world alone, happy to be free...
...best scenes in the film center around Caligula's Latin class, and show the teacher drumming passive paraphrastics and ablative absolutes into his cowering pupils with a vengeance which would have brought joy to his namesake...
Torment is a pretty film because the boy breaks so cleanly with his past, because Caligula is a master beast, and because Miss Olsen drinks herself to death with brandy, rather than cheap rotgut. But the film never rises to a high level because the trio's, and most especially the boy's torment lacks both the moral depth of Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and the personal intensity of Anderson's Tea and Sympathy. The three are unhappy, but not convincingly miserable...