Word: ironist
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Yojimbo. In the movies, where every man is a genius until proven otherwise, only one director of recent years has not been proven otherwise: Japan's Akira Kurosawa. In Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood he displayed formidable powers as a moralist, an ironist, a calligraphist of violence. In Ikiru, one of cinema's rare great works of art. he revealed a rugged realism, an exquisite humanity, a sense for what is sublime in being human. Now. in a movie that is both a wow of a show and a masterpiece of misanthropy, Kurosawa emerges...
...much is fine storytelling; the remainder is an ironist's art. The viewpoint abruptly shifts to that of the new men. In their log boats, they are fleeing in panic from the terrors of the dark forests and the strange, hairy creatures whom they had, all unwittingly, already exterminated for all history. One of them works on a piece of ivory, grinding it to a point with a stone, and wonders why he bothers: "Who would sharpen a point against the darkness of the world?" he thinks...
...doubt about it now: Japan's Akira Kurosawa must be numbered with Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith among the supreme creators of cinema. Rashomon (1952) introduced him to U.S. audiences as a powerful ironist. The Magnificent Seven (1956) demonstrated his mastery of movies as pure movement. Ikiru (1960), one of the screen's great spiritual documents, revealed him as a moralist both passionate and profound. Throne of Blood, a resetting of Macbeth among the clanking thanes and brutish politics of 16th century Japan, is a visual descent into the hell of greed and superstition, into the gibbering...
...bracelet from Athens, still attached to a severed arm, in memory of their affair). Before the first act is over she has seduced Pittakos' twin brother Phaon, the diver who recovers the tablets from the lost city. Like his Novelist Pursewarden in the Quartet, Durrell is a superb ironist, and the play's central theme-that man is responsible for his world as immutably as he is its victim-turns on the fact that Sappho herself has forced the destiny of Lesbos by deceitfully assuming the voice of the island's controlling oracle...
SOME ANGRY ANGEL, by Richard Condon (275 pp.; McGraw-Hill; $4.50), marks the third appearance of an ironist whose iron holds a keener edge than most. After his fine, mordant first novel. The Oldest Confession, he did a few handstands to attract attention, and the result was The Manchurian Candidate (TIME, July 6). an impressively comic but chaotic novel whose message-all is vanity and venality, and even the noblest of men knows not the way to the washroom-was not always audible over the author's sousaphone accompaniment. The present book appears to contain the same admonition, though...