Word: gaudier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...elaborate escapes because that is where the applause was. He was born in Brooklyn's Irishtown at the turn of the century, and there was a point in his teens when a slight tilt of circumstance might have sent him-street-wise and nervy-into one of the gaudier branches of lawyering. He went into armed robbery instead. He would appear at a bank door, wearing the uniform of a messenger or a cop, after the help had begun to arrive but before the doors opened to customers. A colleague or two would help him intimidate the staff...
...Giinther Schneider-Siemssen). Maybe the old helmets were corny, but they were no worse than the dated bouffant coiffes the maidens now wear, not to speak of the evening gowns, complete with sequins and bugle beads. The nine mighty young immortals lack only evening purses to pass for the gaudier members of the audience...
...impressive sequence, one surpassing another in virtuosity, like the work of a magician developing his craft, slow motion, before his audience. The Collector was a comparatively simple pass?butterflies in psychotic transformation turned into pinioned women, perhaps a gothic variation on Lepidopterist Nabokov. In The Magus, Fowles worked gaudier effects: allegory, romance, black magic. The French Lieutenant's Woman played the entire Victorian milieu against the 20th century; Fowles could so persuasively dream up another world that he was free to call all of it into speculation by proposing alternative endings to the novel...
Russell's Gaudier (Scott Anthony) has the ebullience and charm of the original, if not the depth: the sculptor emerges as a stereotype of the rollicking boho, leapfrogging over beds and smashing dealers' windows, spouting off against Establishment art values from the top of an Easter Island head in the Louvre, and performing unlikely - and, in real life, unrecorded - feats of gymnastics like carving a marble torso several feet high in six hours flat to im press a dealer. Sophie Brzeska is played by Dorothy Tutin - an elegantly controlled and touching exercise in tight, fey dottiness...
Alas, the context in which Russell sets these performances is obtuse to the point of caricature. Did Gaudier-Brzeska have a mistress? Then she must be a pneumatic and witless art groupie (Helen Mirren), daughter of a landed cavalry officer, who does her obligatory nude scene on the staircase of an immense, frigid Adam country house; she must also be a suffragette, which gives Russell much opportunity for lumpen-sexist travesty by having her do a song-and-hop number about votes for women in a nightclub and then, at Gaudier's demand, drop her knickers onstage. Around...