Word: likeness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...movie business, but few as sour as The Comic. If its advertisements are to be believed, the movie is simply a fond lampoon of Hollywood's pride-and-pratfall epoch. As the film unreels, it becomes in fact a furious editorial about a business that treats its veterans like overexposed celluloid...
Combining a scholar's passion for detail with a novelist's fertile imagination, Mujica-Lainez set about constructing from the few known facts a sumptuous, fictional Doge's Palace of the mind. Like that famous seat of the Venetian Republic, whose ceiling, walls and floors constitute a convulsion of visual splendor, Bomarzo's pages glitter with descriptions of processions, land and naval battles, landscapes, a courtesan's sultry rec room and a cabalist's murky study...
...asks dubiously, but he takes his visitor on a tour. The sight of an old anniversary present in the lover's bedroom is too much even for the husband's reserve. He seizes a piece of sculpture, beats the lover to death, and disposes of the corpse like a sanitation man hauling away the weekend debris. The husband's fate is irrevocable, of course, but watching him along the way to his comeuppance is worth the slight comedown of the denouement...
Chabrol edits his film like Hitchcock, cutting to unexpected angles for jarring surprise effect, and stages a body disposal scene that is reminiscent of Psycho. The performances are restrained and electric with tension, like the film itself. La Femme Infidèle does not have the full impact of the master's touch, but at least it demonstrates the benefits of the Hitchcock tutelage...
...Like Philoctetes' stinking wound-a classical symbol of the relationship between art and abnormality-Orsini's back is the burden of his genius. It compels him to refine everything into art, including cruelty and murder. He even lays a beautifully cunning trap to secure an heir by mating his brother with his wife. Ironically, this perverted, successful stratagem restores his own potency. A brood of his own follows-including another hunchback...