Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...right eye, the flaccid skin-but sees only the hard, skeptical eyes, the restless energy of the small frame. Rhee is the last of the old heroes of the Korean struggle for independence, a man with long memories. Just outside Seoul lie the ruins of Westgate prison, where the Emperor Koh-Jong's jailers spliced Rhee's fingers between wooden wands which the jailers twisted until his fingers were almost ripped from the joints; there he was imprisoned for seven years...
...Emperor's Clothes (by George Tabori) is theatrically an in-&-outer and artistically a might-have-been. Playwright Tabori (Flight Into Egypt) has yoked a fascinating idea for a play to a good deal more familiar one, and the two neither run very well in harness nor altogether keep to the road. Tabori's scene is Budapest in 1930; his atmosphere that of an incipient police state; his chief characters a small boy (Brandon de Wilde) and his father (Lee J. Cobb). The boy inhabits a mental world swarming with such heroes as Sherlock Holmes, Hoot Gibson...
There could be a terrifying play in what the fantasies of a Tarkingtonian small boy could give rise to in a totalitarian society: the scene in The Emperor's Clothes where two goons grill the father about Hoot Gibson's war on "the cattle barons is a frightening reductio ad absurdum of police state methods. But what might have been a brilliantly sardonic social satire has first been squeezed inside a domestic framework and then dropped from the picture itself. Though the family story has its own realistic interest, it is never made real. Mixing and garnishing...
...Emperor's Clothes has a crashing finale, but what crashes is whatever is left of a serious play. The play takes its name from the Hans Christian Andersen tale in which a small boy is the only person who dares to cry out that the parading Emperor has no clothes on. Tabori's play has all too many clothes on, but there is not much underneath...
...diplomats and big industrialists, deep in Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East), talked of a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. Kaiser Wilhelm II rode through the sweltering streets of Damascus one day in 1898 to tell the citizens that Moslems "may rest assured that at all times the German Emperor will be their friend." Hitler took up where Wilhelm II left off: by the time the Nazis invaded Russia, Germany was dominating the markets of Turkey and Iran...