Word: duel
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Americans once demanded a lot less of their national public figures than they do now. In the frontier days, a politician often proved himself by demonstrating his capacity for drink, women and duels. Alexander Hamilton was able to continue his career in politics even after publicly acknowledging that he had paid blackmail to a woman. The fact that Andrew Jackson killed a man in a duel, defending the honor of his wife, probably helped him get elected President. During his four years in the White House, Franklin Pierce often drank himself into a stupor, but, says Historian John Roche...
...young baron Tusenbach, the lieutenant who wins Irina's hand only to be shot in a duel, Brain Bedford performs with great skill--to the extent to actually playing on the piano the middle section of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu. His glasses, moustache, and long hair parted squarely in the center help make him properly homely. There is an extraordinary amount of traffic in this play--entrances and exists, greeting and farewells. One of the most moving farewells in all drama is the parting of Irina and Tusenbach in Act IV--a fine example of Chekhov's oblique method...
Irina's other suitor is the captain, Solyony, who kills Tusenbach in the duel. He is a strange man, and throughout the play keeps putting scent on his hands to get rid of their smell of death--like some sort of male Lady Macbeth. Right from the first act, Charles Cioffi's portrayal is a remarkable piece of acting. Solyony speaks scarcely a half dozen times in all of Act I, and spends most of the time sitting silently on a chair in the corner. Nevertheless, Cioffi tells us a great deal about this morose and mysterious character. We notice...
Incidentally, the fatal duel does not occur on stage. By his own admission, Chekhov had a hard time doing without the conventional pistol shot, which was an important feature of every one of his plays through The Three Sisters. But here, for the first time, the pistol shot takes place way off in the distance. And only in his final play, The Cherry Orchard, is there no pistol--instead we hear the forlorn sound of a far-off axe chopping a tree as the curtain falls...
...almost pure, reflected human forms. The motion of their figures in Ophuls' long, smooth takes being continuous, the characters are also trapped in time, locked to their very motion and change of place. Then at the end of Madame de...the heroine's lover is shot in a duel. She simply stops; Ophuls intercuts an extraordinary series of medium and long shots of her stationary figure atop a hill. With this cessation of motion, she is dead--and indeed Ophuls dissolves to a shot of her coffin. A romantic life demanded her continuous motion, and when she can longer sustain...