Word: duel
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...Duel of Angels (translated and adapted by Christopher Fry from the French of Jean Giraudoux) was the last play written before his death in 1944, by the wittily ironic, aromatically pessimistic author of The Madwoman of Chaillot and Tiger at the Gates. It is a suavely chill farewell -a glass of iced champagne held in almost as cold a hand. Called Pour Lucrece in French, it offers-in the Aix-en-Provence of 1868-variations on the old tale of the violated Roman matron who, after bidding her family avenge her, committed suicide. It opens in the best Giraudoux style...
...itself-violated Lucrèce theme sounds louder chords, as the pure lady bids the rake kill himself only for him to be killed in a duel, as the righteous judge rejects the wife he thinks was raped and she takes poison, rejecting life itself, Giraudoux's artificial story remains scrupulously behind glass. But gusts of realistic rain or melodramatic sleet from time to time beat against it. Giraudoux cleverly lets his characters remark how tragedy is jostling farce, or drama is encroaching on comedy. But the play, as it plunges over rapids in which both men and women...
...Annunzio wore his school uniform with such an air of authority that soldiers saluted him. At 19 he was a journalist and cafe ornament in Rome. At 20 he married a lady of noble name, and soon afterward acquired a scalp wound in a saber duel with a literary enemy. Thereafter, his luxuriant chestnut hair fell out. leaving the poet bald-but romantically so. A marginal growth of beard, big, bulging blue eyes and a glorious voice rounded out his romantic panache. Through all this persisted a galloping logorrhea...
...Sanders recalls, with champagne, ammunition and more jam. After his family fled to England, Sanders easily withstood a British public-school education (Brighton College), got a job with a South American cigarette company, but was thrown out when he pinked his mistress' fiancé in a revolver duel. A bounder, but not yet a villain, Sanders returned to London and developed a low opinion of singers by briefly becoming one (bass-baritone). The move to cinema came naturally, and the author's sneer became permanently and profitably fixed...
...proved as adroit and magnetic off the platform as on it. In Kenya, when Kikuyu women in bright-colored print dresses presented him with a head basket for his wife, he jauntily put it on his own head. When he was challenged by a confident Mohammedan missionary to a "duel" of healing the sick, Graham smiled and said: "The Lord has not given me the power of healing. He has only given me the power of speaking...