Word: cordelia
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...introductory scene between the Earls of Gloucester and Kent is eliminated; the film begins immediately with the parcelling of the kingdom among the three daughters. The first words are Lear's "Know we have divided-in three our kingdom...", Brook thrusting us into crisis at once. Within five minutes Cordelia has already refused to publicly acclaim her love for her father. Lear has disowned her, and the central dramatic movement...
...that is the drift of the directing throughout. Brook is impatient with peripheral events and dispenses with them as often as possible. He uses explanatory titles to speed up the action and cuts scenes mercilessly. It is toward the great events that his imagination tends--Lear raging at Cordelia or mad in the storm on the heath or overwhelmed with regret before his death--and on these scenes Brook lavishes his attention lovingly. To the Gloucester subplot he is for the most part cursory. He reserves his ingenuity for Lear alone. And as Lear, Paul Scofield carries the film...
...play has always been a problem play, whose rough edges have never been smoothed to everyone's satisfaction. Samuel Johnson found it too emotionally overwhelming and preferred a version in which Cordelia survived. The question in any production is not whether the problems will all be solved but which problems will be conceded as irresolvable...
Sometimes, a powerful dramatic effect is totally lost. When Lear sees that Cordelia (Annelise Gabold), his sole loving daughter, is dead, he utters the fivefold "Never" that some regard as the greatest single line in English drama. But in the film, he does not fumble at his throat and go on to say "Pray you, undo this button," thus depriving the act of tragic purgation and vertiginous descent from regal magnificence to the pitiable humanity of the commonplace...
...life-now married and the mother of two, she lives in a castle in the Italian Tyrol-Mary writes gracefully but modestly. Pound is the major figure in her book, and she willingly plays Cordelia to his Lear. Perhaps at times she adds too soft a shading to the fierce old face-who could begrudge him that? Who would not be glad to hear that he and Olga are still together in old age, "taking care of each other"? Who could not envy him the vision he rescued out of horror...