Word: headsman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lord High Everything Else, was marvelous as the proud but corrupt political hack. But the undisputed star of the show was Josh Rubins, as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner. Following the opulent train of reverent courtiers, he wore a ludicrous robe decorated with axe-heads and carried a headsman's axe several inches taller than he is. It was enough to bring down the house. His version of "As someday it may happen that a victim must be found" included some updated lines ( that singular anomaly, the strict constructionist ), and visual effects-pulling out a picture of Nixon while...
...future." It blasts off with a scene so brilliant that the whole picture shivers from the thrust. In a masque, a musically flatulent clown capers on a stage, mocking the audience with scatological jokes and gestures. A grinning idiot is carried onstage and led to a chopping block. A headsman mimes a blow with his weapon -then chops the victim's hand off to a chorus of cackles, while freshets of blood stain the scene. It is a savage fragment of the cinema of cruelty, a death-in-life image, like T.S. Eliot's perception of "the skull...
...like Katherine, she is natally undone. England needs a future king. The old Queen produced stillborn princes. The new one gives birth to a live female and a dead male. Enraged, Henry VIII rigs charges of adultery against Anne and dooms her to the Tower of London and the headsman...
...spine and soothe his own (in O'Connell's view) active conscience. To protect his subjects, Richelieu lectured Louis, a sovereign must first protect the state. When the state is threatened, the first consideration is not to ensure justice but to remove the threat. Sadly, the headsman could not eliminate the doubts of rivals and traitors; happily, he could turn them into abstractions...
...exciting events described by the 13th century Venetian in the chronicle of his travels in Cathay, and introduce instead 100 minutes of substandard horse operatics that resemble polo more than Polo? What's more, the cutting looks as though it had been done by a Mongolian headsman; the dubbing is so wildly out of sync that occasionally a word spoken by one actor seems to come out of another actor's mouth; and the color print looks like a fresco restored with the assistance of Clorox...