Word: mad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Snow White v. the Mad Hatter...
...portrait of the artist as the most scrupulous, harried and genteel academic dropout of the half-century. After studies at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford. Eliot gave up his Ph.D. degree (as Pound had before him) to write poetry. He married a neurotic woman who eventually went mad. To support them, he lectured, edited, wrote occasional literary pieces, taught at the High Wycombe Grammar School for "?140 per annum with dinner," eventually gravitating to a job at Lloyds Bank...
...drift of the directing throughout. Brook is impatient with peripheral events and dispenses with them as often as possible. He uses explanatory titles to speed up the action and cuts scenes mercilessly. It is toward the great events that his imagination tends--Lear raging at Cordelia or mad in the storm on the heath or overwhelmed with regret before his death--and on these scenes Brook lavishes his attention lovingly. To the Gloucester subplot he is for the most part cursory. He reserves his ingenuity for Lear alone. And as Lear, Paul Scofield carries the film...
Particularly fine is Brook's handling of the difficult scene between a now blinded Gloucester and his son Edgar, still disguised as a mad beggar. Not recognizing his son, Gloucester begs to be led to the cliffs of Dover where he would be able to jump to his death. Instead, Edgar leads him to the flattest of beaches, all the while persuading him that they are indeed scaling heights. Believing he is on a precipice, Gloucester leaps, only to fall harmlessly to the ground. Finally, convinced he has been saved by a miracle, he resolves to try suicide no more...
...after President Nixon did not nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. "I sure did," chirped Martha Mitchell. "Why, I've been suffering to get a woman on the court. I'm sick and tired of women being third-class citizens. I heard Mrs. Nixon was so mad she was packing her bags. Well, I got a lead on her. I packed earlier, so I could go over and help...