Word: crime
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After centuries of control by men, the world is still seared by ever more frequent and violent wars and threats of war. Fear, oppression, poverty, disease and crime still stalk abroad...
...Guilty? An investigator armed with all the inside information that Author Wilder makes available for him should have no difficulty in deciding who instigated the crime. In this account, Brutus is a minor character. Cassius does not even appear. If they did not know about Brutus, readers might well decide that the real villain must have been Clodia Pulcher, a likely suspect if there ever was one, dissolute, clever, and already mixed up in one attempt on Caesar's life...
...Dastardly Crime at Midnight is made to order for the Mason treatment and after a slow start in a well-lit classroom, murder captures the sound-track. A doctor (Mason) tells his criminology class of a case of revenge, the camera reveals in flashbacks that Mason is his own subject, and that his lecture only anticipates his later actions. The original scheme, however, breaks down in practice and Mason's outlook gets blacker and blacker as complications arise between the killing and the burying. He does what he can to lose the body, but finally fails when he is persuaded...
...revenge as a gesture of independence. Mason the murderer, with a body on his hands, contrasts effectively with a disenchanted country pill-roller who is guiltless, but parttles of the hundreds he has "killed' in his practice. Further contrast comes when Mason scampers behind a railing to hide his crime from a gardener coming home whistling hymns. The gardener, by the way, is the only one who doesn't succumb to the Mason Look, but perhaps he just doesn't believe in fads...
...soon as the curtain is up (there is no overture), it is clear that Peter Grimes, although he has committed no crime, is as doomed as a character in a Kafka novel. The opera opens with Peter facing an inquest-indeed a trial-in the village hall. He has just returned from a fishing voyage with his boy apprentice dead. The inquest absolves him, but with sinister warnings that it had better not happen again, and the townspeople gossip about him. Peter rages: "Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head . . . let me stand trial. Bring...