Word: gored
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Suddenly, Last Summer, Tennessee Williams at his ripest, with appropriate support from Joseph Mankiewicz, who directed and Gore Vidal, who wrote the screenplay. Katherine Hepburn is Aunt Venable, raising carnivorous plants in her garden and dreaming of her son, Sebastian, a gay post who ended up being eaten by canaibah. Elizabeth Taylor is the traumatized niece who witnessed the set, and Montgomery Clift is the shrink who cures her. Overacted, overwritten and overheated...
That is the theory underlying two recent Nixon satires. I mile de Antonio's video production Milhouse and An Evening with Richard Nixon, a theater piece by Gore Vidal. These "comedies" do more than avoid disentangling the real Nixon from his popular caricature--the self-repressed, ambitious, and self-righteous liar. They construct a semi-comic figure entirely from Nixon's own words. In this sense, they are black comedy. Our laughter barely hides our disgust. It is the President of the United States, not an impersonator, who seems ludicrous. Our sense of his ineptitude only underscores our disbelief...
...Evening with Richard Nixon operates along the same lines. Although the real Nixon is unseen, his actual words are continually heard. The exploration of his public lies is comprehensive and thoroughly annotated. Gore Vidal's play takes the form of a biography narrated by George Washington: the recorded version explains that only the dead can afford "the non-political luxury of truth." Eisenhower and Kennedy are along to offer comments, sometimes speaking in their words, sometimes in Vidal's. A host of other personalities offer their actual comments on Nixon. The result would be cruel, except that, as Vidal...
...scene lifted from A Director's Notebook) encounter a remnant of the ancient past-an old house with statues intact and frescoes that look, unfortunately, like WPA murals. Air from the outside is eating rapidly away at the paintings, turning them to dust. Later Fellini recruits Gore Vidal, perhaps the closest living descendant of Epicurus, to discourse ironically on Rome's inevitable disintegration. The film ends with shots of helmeted motorcyclists roaring over dark, deserted streets...
...Ernestine routines, she is dunning an invisible Gore Vidal -whose name she pronounces "Veedle"-for $23.64. When "Mr. Veedle" talks back, she threatens him with all those recordings that the phone company has been making of his calls over the years. "I think blackmail is such an ugly word," she tells him in a voice that mixes honey with brine. "Let's just call it a vicious threat...