Word: coffin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When Michel de Ghelderode was a child, his mother told him of a little girl who died and was about to be buried. just as the lid lowered over the girl's coffin, she opened her eyes. She had been in a trance. By awaking in time, she saved herself for another death...
Among the horrible and the melodramatic episodes, for example, de Ghelderode intercalates what he calls "comic and burlesque corrective potentialities"; a coffin maker, for example, consoles Jairus on Blandine's death before Blandine has, died and insists that she must be dead because he heard is rumored. Without some consistent guide, these corrective potentialities may be abused; when Jairus laments, "What ludicious mishaps around the most dramatic of happenings," they may seem indeed ludicrous, instead of strangely horrible...
...times in the past 27 years, Author Ambler has taken ingredients not unlike these and distilled his own aromatic blend of 160-proof suspense-sometimes with the smoky overtones of his early A Coffin for Dimitrios, sometimes with the dry, fruity tang of last year's The Light of Day (bubblingly filmed by Jules Dassin as Topkapi). This time, unfortunately, somebody's been tinkering with the formula. As Piet and Lucia go through their appointed rounds of deception and huff-and-puff chase, the reader begins to realize that too many of the motivations are phony, too much...
...stage version, an express train stops unexpectedly at Guellen, a poverty-stricken village somewhere in Central Europe. Onto the platform sweeps "the richest woman in the world," a flamboyant beldame whose effects include a wooden leg, a pair of eunuchs, a caged panther and an empty coffin. She has returned to her birthplace seeking revenge. She offers a fortune to Guellen and its citizens in exchange for the life of one man, now a local merchant, who seduced her when she was 17, left her pregnant and dishonored after hiring perjurers to testify to her lewdness. "The world made...
...darkly gleaming heart of it has undergone major surgery. In a postscript to his play, Dürrenmatt wrote: "Nothing could harm this comedy with a tragic end more than heavy seriousness." Director Bernhard Wicki falls into that error, compounding it with a gimmicky screenplay. The eunuchs, the coffin, and much of the mordant wit are omitted, as is the wooden leg. The sex angle is fattened up with a juicy subplot. And to make the slow corrosion of conscience more graphic, the good burghers of Guellen struggle against the all-too-solid temptation of a flotilla of trucks-crammed...