Word: guignol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Bette Davis and Joan Crawford come back big as a couple of hilarious old horrors in the year's most gorgeously gory bit of grand guignol...
Just off the Rue Pigalle in Paris, men with picks, shovels and wrecking equipment are preparing to demolish a tiny, 230-seat theater that has just folded after 65 bloodcurdling years. It is the Grand Guignol. Although its name had percolated down to the bedrock of dramatic criticism in half a dozen languages, most people thought the theater itself had vanished long since. Now they are right. The last clotted eyeball has plopped onto the stage. The last entrail has been pulled like an earthworm from a conscious victim. The Grand Guignol is closed forever...
...another occasion she serves a salad of unplucked parakeet-will be amply rewarded by the horror of her company. In what may well be the year's scariest, funniest and most sophisticated chiller, she gives a performance that cannot be called great acting but is certainly grand guignol. And Joan effectively plays the bitch to Bette's witch...
...once dismissed as a refugee from the Grand Guignol is now widely considered to be Britain's most exciting painter. At 52, Bacon deserves his success, for he has resisted every trend and fashion in art to hack out a path all his own. Though shaped by such old masters as Rembrandt, Daumier and Velasquez ("He haunts me so much I can't let him go"), he has been as much influenced by the here and now of the photograph as by anything else. War, terrorism, gory accidents-these fleeting instants of agony fascinate Bacon. His torn...
...opera, on Henry James's unattractive little post-Gothic and pre-Freudian shocker, The Turn of the Screw, I confess I cannot easily conceive: James's novella, I have always thought, could only be dramatized by someone experienced in the nuances of psychological muck--a writer of the Grand Guignol, say, or perhaps even Mr. Alfred Hitchcock...