Word: countess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...officers have been unable to find the heiress in New York, where she lives most of the year. Their latest ploy: a missing persons' notice in the Swedish government newspaper, Post and Inrikes Tidningar. "I don't believe Greta will take the money," mused longtime Garbo friend Countess Kerstin Bernadotte, 65. "Perhaps she'll send it to poor relatives in Sweden...
...Forman was an invaluable eyewitness to his superstitious yet brilliant era. Born in 1552, the self-educated country bumpkin who set up shop in London as an astrologer and unlicensed doctor soon became a kind of lay analyst to a cross-section of his society. Titled ladies, including the Countess of Essex and Somerset, consulted him. So did churchmen, merchants, seafarers, servants and prostitutes. A grandson of Thomas More was one of his clients, as were Shakespeare's landlady and Emilia Bassano, the mysterious Venetian who Rowse claims (in Shakespeare the Man) was the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets...
...same trouble--a confusion of the profound with the merely unintelligible--mars Marisa Berenson's Countess of Lyndon. Perhaps Kubrick wanted her to look like those enigmatic Tuscan profiles her great uncle used to sell to Boston brahmins. She falls in love with Barry, marries him, remains statuesque but apathetic, and finally becomes religious. She is weak, and as such the audience tends to sympathize with her. But it is unclear whether Barry treats her rightly or wrongly. We see nothing of their courtship. We see little of their relations in marriage. We just don't know...
...over inheritance, Barry's mother's desire for her son to get a peerage, the social ostracism that Barry faces after an outburst of physical violence. Kubrick's elegant touch is not entirely lost, but it is squandered and irreversibly diluted. At last a strange plot line emerges. The Countess of Lyndon's son by her first husband, Bullingdon, conceives a hatred for his stepfather that is largely justified by Barry's behavior. Barry becomes the doting father of a spoiled brat, Bryan, who kills himself riding a horse. Bryan's death scene is the most treacliest tearjerker since Charles...
AFTER THAT, it's all downhill--although as far as any standards of art, taste and technique go, this scene was the low point of the film. Barry takes to drink and the Countess tries to commit suicide in a scene in which Marisa Berenson sloughs her phlegm and becomes a flailing dervish. Bullingdon wreaks his revenge. It's hard to say what we are supposed to feel when he is successful and the movie ends at last. The narrator had more or less given away the conclusion an hour before, and dissipated most of the suspense. The Countess remains...