Word: madding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...split in the Greek Orthodox Church, and outright mutiny against towering, white-bearded Athenagoras I of Constantinople, 268th Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Athenagoras' enemies call him a "religio-politician," while his friends point to the unique problems of a job in which his predecessor went mad. The Patriarch of Constantinople has only the power of persuasion among three others of equal rank, ruling the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. For "Elder Brother" Patriarch Athenagoras, 72, adroit politics is the main healing art in a strife-torn church that includes some 250 million souls...
...economically underprivileged. He allows the audience to hear it as "superb and wild," but for Pegeen Mike Flaherty, who lives in it, it is "this place where you'll meet none but Red Linahan, has a squint in his eye, and Patcheen is lame in his heel, or the mad Mulrannies were driven from California and they lost in their wits"--not a decent man in the lot. Since Pegeen is a romantic, brainy, and spirited girl (well played by Helena Carroll with the right sort of peppery vigor), the local manpower shortage has made her "the fright of seven...
...into collision with the real world but insists upon continuing to suffer [and] never despairs." When readers first meet Don Quixote, continues Auden, "he is (a) poor (b) not a knight, (c) 50, (d) has nothing to do except hunt and read romances about Knight-Errantry . . . Suddenly he goes mad, i.e., he sets out to become what he admires . . . Religiously, it is a conversion, an act of faith, a taking up of his cross...
Still, there are moments when the hard-digging moviemakers strike it fairly rich. There are a couple of good fights, and a lynching bee in which the many-legged mob moves with the terrifying instinctual coordination and single-mindlessness of a colossal millipede gone mad. Karl Maiden makes a memorably silly-sinister billy goat. Actress Schell, holding a hard rein on her sentimental excesses, gives a gracious, intelligent performance. And though Actor Cooper, when required to produce the piercingly analytic stare, can do no more than push out his chin and look as though he is about to whinny...
British Novelist Johnson parodies Rolfe to perfection in all his attributes save one; the mad genius that cut Hadrian the Seventh into one of the diamonds of modern fiction. But she tells her tale waspishly and well, and transports to the canals of Bruges much of the sacred luster and glory that Frederick Rolfe adored in Venice...