Word: impostor
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...experience. Niven served with distinction as a British commando officer in World War II, returned to star in more than 60 films, including Around the World in 80 Days, The Guns of Navarone and Separate Tables, in which he gave a 1958 Oscar-winning portrayal of a pathetic military impostor. His candid, bestselling memoirs (The Moon's a Balloon, Bring on the Empty Horses) abound with lightly told anecdotes of Errol Flynn's drunken revels and Greta Garbo's nude swims. Niven once described Hollywood as a "hotbed of false values. . . but it was fascinating...
High suspense it isn't--despite the melodramatic (and usually inappropriate) bursts of background music. You may even find that you don't particularly care if the man sleeping with Bertrande is an impostor or the real McCoy. But what this slowly paced film lacks in top-flight mystery is made up for by its compelling authenticity; in fact, director Daniel Vigne recreates 16th-century village life in painstaking detail. The film spills over with highly convincing silhouettes of village routines--shaking the chaff from the grain in woven baskets, donning animal costumes for a religious festival, and the ubiquitous...
...other words, you're damned if you do and demand if you don't--"deviant" behavior is unacceptable, but leaving the village would be an even more heinous crime. And while Bertrande and her husband are physically threatened by those who suspect Martin is an impostor, it never occurs to the couple to begin again in another town. But that is only a solution in today's mobile, even rootless, society: in 16th-century France, even train travels would have been far too swift...
...selected Plays demonstrate, Kleist was the first great absurdist, obsessed with justice and the black-comic ways in which it can miscarry. The Broken Pitcher centers on a judge who is also a malefactor; in Amphitryon, the great Theban commander rages against an impostor "who wants me . .. out of the fortress of my consciousness." This sense of self as an armed camp is one of many traits that make the playwright seem a contemporary of another great admirer, Bertolt Brecht...
Sometimes, the urge does not vanish. The results are alarming. This month Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. died. That was his final career change. His obituary listed nearly as many metamorphoses as Ovid did. Demara, "the Great Impostor," spent years a his life being successfully and utterly someone else: a Trappist monk, a doctor of psychology, a dean of philosophy at a small Pennsylvania college, a law student, a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy, a deputy warden at a prison in Texas. Demara took the protean itch and amateur's gusto, old American traits, to new frontiers of pathology...