Word: madame
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...Balcony. Jean Genet's shocker, part burlesque, part Black Mass, argues that the world is a vast brothel run by an allegorical madam who panders illusions to her customers in return for the surrender of their masculinity. Shelley Winters is the madam...
...most ferociously brilliant poet now at work in the French theater of the absurd. In The Balcony, a drama that resembles both a burlesque show and a Black Mass. Genet expounds his fantasies in a monstrous metaphor: the world is a vast brothel operated by an infernal, supernal, eternal Madam who sells her customers illusions in return for the surrender of their masculinity...
...film version of the play, produced in Hollywood for $200,000, is relentlessly funny, shaggy, shocking. A revolution is raging as the picture begins. Society is collapsing, but prostitution is undisturbed. "Sometimes as a theater, sometimes as a church." the Madam (Shelley Winters) proclaims, "this house will always be here." In the film the house is situated in a film studio, in a pavilion of illusions. One chamber is arranged as a hall of justice: in it an office worker, satanic in black robes, buys the illusion that he is a judge and cruelly extracts a confession of a prostitute...
...squarely constructed redheaded woman in her middle 30s, with the hoarse voice and hearty manner of a call-house madam, she talks about sex in clear, unsubtle terms. Her joke vocabulary is full of colons and ova. She discusses sexual failures, makes fun of women with abnormally small chest development, and moves from person to person in her audiences making clever references to the probable size of their genitalia. Some of her words are pretty old Collegiate Gothic, like horny and poontang. And she is billed as The Knockers Up Girl...
...Greenmantle, for instance, another Hannay pal called Sandy Arbuthnot spurns the passionate advances of a fetching but fell lady spy named Hilda von Einem. "You must know, Madam," he says as bullets whiz about them, "that I am a British officer." Nowadays such behavior is hopelessly out of all fashion, literary and otherwise...