Word: macbeths
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...infancy; this week the American Film Institute is showing the 1912 The Life and Death of King Richard III, the oldest surviving U.S. feature film. For MGM in 1936, Leslie Howard (then 43) and Norma Shearer (36) played Romeo and Juliet. The movies have put Shakespeare in gangland (Joe Macbeth) and outer space (Forbidden Planet, from The Tempest...
...disease is known to doctors as "irrational rationality" because it forces its victims to defy reason while seeming to embrace it. Characters as disparate as Howard Hughes, Lady Macbeth and Freud's sexually conflicted "Rat Man" are among its victims. Today, in every elementary school of 200 pupils or so, three or four youngsters are likely to suffer from it. Howard Hughes' symptoms included an insistence on having a germ-free environment and all his windows permanently sealed. The schoolchildren are more inclined to count cracks in the blacktop (for them, "Step on a crack, break your mother's back...
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, which affects 1% to 3% of Americans, was until recently considered a chronic, untreatable condition. Victims more ordinary than Lady Macbeth and Howard Hughes are haunted by persistent, intrusive thoughts or worries (obsessions), and may spend countless hours performing repetitive rituals (compulsions) such as hand washing, counting, hoarding old clothes, arranging napkins in a meaningless symmetry or checking a hundred times to make sure the electric coffeemaker is turned off. Themes of dirt, contamination or germs rule their thoughts, and other common obsessions center on horrific or violent images, a need for symmetry or exactness...
...whopping 73% of all violent scenes, the perpetrator went unpunished. These figures, however, were based on some overly strict guidelines: perpetrators of violence, for example, must be punished in the same scene as the violent act. By that measure, most of Shakespeare's tragedies would be frowned on; Macbeth, after all, doesn't get his comeuppance until the end of the play...
...early years. But to evoke a film, it helps to have moving pictures, and The Battle over Citizen Kane, which runs the lives of Welles and Hearst on parallel tracks until they collide in 1941, is a two-hour tornado of a documentary, with rare clips of the 1936 Macbeth, some quaint home movies of Hearst's costume parties, reminiscences by such Welles colleagues as lighting designer Abe Feder (still jazzy after all these years) and William Alland (who played the reporter in Kane). Best is the cogent narration, written by Lennon and Richard Ben Cramer and delivered by Cramer...