Word: magician
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From a suitcase H.B. produced two miniature coffins containing photographs of himself, some bottles of doubtful-looking potions, and other tools of the black magician's trade. "For a Westerner," he said, "all this may seem childish, but we are at the heart of a great drama being played in black Africa. These fetishes are the root of the problem, because behind each one there is poison...
Harness for Three. Symbolism soon begins to snowball: the mime helps a weary roustabout water his elephants, sits in for a Negro in an "African Dip" show while a wicked white man throws baseballs at him, rescues a pretty girl from an evil magician. He and his followers (the elephant man, the Negro, the girl) break up the act of Magnus and his Living Marionettes by entering the tent to brush the shoes of all the children in the audience. The Living Marionettes are hauled down from their harnesses; Magnus is furious...
Then the white-garbed clown gets into a harness himself, and, as he is hoisted aloft, the magician stabs him, the racist throws baseballs at him, and he is beaten by an irate sideshow barker. The cries of his death agony shatter the sound track. In a silence that follows, three empty harnesses dangle from their ropes, and the remorseful Magnus goes to put white makeup on his face. In the final scene an all-white figure is riding the donkey as the circus moves on. Is it the clown-or the puppeteer-or Everyman-or Christ...
Cheever's demonic quality is just beginning to emerge in his fiction from its buttoned-up Brooks Brothers carapace of realism. It has always been recognized in the private pre-Ovidian Cheever. "He is a magician," says his friend Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, recalling the old women who lurked in the back parlors of the Negro section of Oklahoma City where he grew up. "He can take a watch chain or something and tell you the whole man." Even Mary Cheever subscribes to the theory that her husband is not as other men. She recounts with some...
When Ingmar Bergman exports a film, he often exports Ingrid Thulin too. She was the somber daughter-in-law in Wild Strawberries, the agonized wife of The Magician, and the plain and neurotic schoolmistress in Winter Light. Now she is the deviate sister in Bergman's new film, The Silence...