Word: genet
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...Balcony. Jean Genet's allegory says that life is a bawdyhouse where men buy illusions at the price of their masculinity. Shelley Winters is the madam who knows what her customers want...
...Balcony. Part burlesque, part Black Mass, Jean Genet's shocker argues that the world is a vast brothel run by an allegorical madam who panders illusions to her customers in return for the surrender of their masculinity. Shelley Winters is the madam...
...Balcony. Jean Genet's shocker, part burlesque, part Black Mass, argues that the world is a vast brothel run by an allegorical madam who panders illusions to her customers in return for the surrender of their masculinity. Shelley Winters is the madam...
...this point, Genet's play dissolves hideously into myth: the immortal myth of the new king who conquers the old king, and then celebrates his marriage to the Mother Goddess with a rite of self-castration. The rebel leader comes to the brothel, buys the illusion that he is the strongman, and at the climax of his impersonation mutilates himself. To delete this episode is to castrate the drama. The moviemakers delete it and the play ends not with a scream but a snigger...
...earlier scenes, however, the low jinks are vigorous and apropos. Genet has a gruesomely pictorial sense of humor ("Is the archbishop dead?"-"I hope so. His head is tied to the handlebars of a little boy's bicycle") and Scenarist Ben Maddow has a cute wit of his own ("The world is full of whores, but a good bookkeeper is hard to find"). Too often, unhappily, the film is cute where the play was poetic, too often Director Joseph Strick permits his performers to natter what they are intended to intone. But moments of lurid lyricism survive, and vestiges...