Word: haider
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...Haider (Alan Howard) is a kind of academic Walter Mitty. But unlike Thurber's daydreamer, Haider has fantasies of failure, doubt and dread. Something dreadful does actually happen to him, and the question-and-answer core of the late British playwright C.P. Taylor's play is how and why. How does a seemingly decent, liberal-minded man like Haider, who lectures on the German classics at the University of Frankfurt, and whose best friend Maurice (Joe Melia) is a Jewish psychoanalyst, wage a retreat from conscience that finds him at Auschwitz as the right-hand man of Adolf...
Taylor takes the tack that Haider is a victim of flattery, subtle intimidation and an inordinate love of the uniform. Out of the emotional stress accompanying his mother's senile dementia, Haider has written a pro-euthanasia novel. It conies to the Fuhrer's attention, and Haider admits to "the surge of pride in me! Reading that scrawled sentence in Adolf s shaky hand-It said: 'Written from the heart...
...Haider's father-in-law suggests that he join the party, and he does. A major in the SS and an old World War I buddy (Pip Miller) suggests that he join the Nazi officer elite corps and he does. As a member of the SS he could secure the tickets to Switzerland for which Maurice pleads, but he is, by now, too self-intimidated...
...might be possible to care more about Haider and his plight if he were not such a typically alienated antihero. The hero of the evening is Alan Howard. His is a meticulously stylized performance and a memorable display of the actor's craft. Howard's array of arid classroom gestures and pinched facial nerves is matched by a voice that barks, chokes, melts and freezes. And when he does a close-to-floor-level, slow-motion goose-step, the monstrous history of the Third Reich seems to be marching past...
Former Los Angeles Detective Robert Haider, who led the investigation of the Tate murder case, says of Fromme: "The girl must've been on at least 1,000 acid trips in her life. It just was not possible to hold a rational conversation with her." Still other people note her recent talk in praise of violence and killing and regard her as capable of almost anything. Last July she threatened Rodney Angove, a reporter for the Associated Press in Sacramento, when he refused to write a story about a press release from Manson attacking Nixon. "It's your...