Word: giraudoux
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JUDITH. Rosemary Harris is superb as the beautiful Jewess who saved her people by killing an Assyrian conqueror. Jean Giraudoux's skeptical version of the apocryphal story reveals a Judith more womanly than saintly, driven not so much by piety as by a desire for personal glory...
JUDITH is more sensualist than saint in Jean Giraudoux's version of the apocryphal tale of the beautiful Jewess who saved Israel by killing an Assyrian general. Rosemary Harris' Judith suggests all the contradictions and fascination of the minx who became a myth...
JUDITH is more sensualist than saint in Jean Giraudoux's version of the apocryphal tale of the beautiful Jewess who saved Israel by killing an Assyrian general. Rosemary Harris' Judith suggests all the contradictions and fascination of the minx who became a myth...
...from being a barbarous monster, Holofernes (Paul Sparer) is Shaw's Caesar, an aphoristic philosopher-king who erotically brainwashes the girl. She swoon-dives into his bed, only to knife him to death at dawn (Giraudoux's style forbids a gory beheading). Judith's romantic rationale for the killing is that love was bound to be blunted by repetition or betrayed by neglect...
...chauvinistic, miracle-mongering high rabbis will hear nothing of this apostasy of fleshly bliss, and in an ambiguous ending, Judith either embraces or resigns herself to the duplicity of her sainthood. If Shaw, in Saint Joan, implies that saints are too pure a currency for the world, Giraudoux, with a more sardonic vision, suggests that they are the world's counterfeit coins...