Word: guinesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...buoyant comic comment finally gives way to a flood of tristitia mundi. Paul McCartney's sweet, detached, phantasmic voice begins, "I read the news today, oh boy,"--a strange, sad phrase which grows heavier as the song grows more hallucinatory. At first the news is about the Guiness heir, son of a Beer peer, dying in his Lotus elan, sad waste of youth, but comic in its utter meaningless. The singer turns on and the song turns more dreamlike, ushering forth a complex metaphor to rank with Dylan's best. "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire/ And though the holes...
...Anyway, Guiness supposes that this peasant girl is really the long-lost daughter of deceased poet Yuri Zhivago and his mistress, Lara. To confirm this judgment, he flips open a volume of Zhivago's poetry, revealing pictures of both the poet and his mistress--Omar Sharif and Julie Christie...
...Julie Christie had been my mother I don't think I would have forgotten, but Rita Tushingham unfortunately has. Unfortunately, because it gives Guiness an excuse, however lame, to launch into the three-thousand-seventeen-minute story of Dr. Zhivago and his small circle of intimates...
Then we return to the present (c. 1950) where Rita Tushingham has finished listening to the tale we've finished watching. Leaving Guiness, she walks across the top of a huge dam, accompanied by her balalaika and finance. Guiness cries out to the latter. "Can she play?" and the finance replies that Rita has been able to hold her own with a balalaika since birth...
...says Alec Guiness turning to the audience to deliver an aside not unlike one of George Burns's in the old Burns & Allen show, "Then it's a gift!" Some laugh; some cry; others are already on their feet, dancing in the aisles. Boris Pasternak never had it so good...