Word: muriel
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...light of Resnais's lifelong adoration of the comics, his work with Stan Lee may be an equally interesting match, though of a decidedly different tone. The comics have been an avowed influence on Resnais's earlier works; he mentions specifically how, in Muriel, they inspired the overlapping of dialogue belonging to one scene with action of another, and how the action on Marienbad had some resemblance to Phil Davis's Mandrake the Magician...
...second playlet Matthau is a case of acute satyriasis billed as Jesse Kiplinger, Famous Hollywood Producer. When his New York schedule frees him from 2 to 4 p.m., Jesse books overcoy Muriel (Barbara Harris). He had stolen her maidenhood 17 years earlier in suburbia; now he wants to return to the crime, if not the scene. Acting under an assumed mane, the red-wigged Matthau is a Narcissus whose self-love is contagious. But Muriel is immune until Jesse discovers the secret: big names. Dropping them like rose petals, he strews the path to the bedroom...Frank Sinatra...Paul Newman...
...could go on and on. The business of the birds asking perilous questions is carried out by making Miles' double's mother a circus performer whose aviary of trained birds includes Iris, Angus, Charles, Pamela, John, Penelope, Brigid, Anthony, Muriel, Mary, Norman, Saul, Philip and Ivy-all named, it would appear, for modern novelists...
...Muriel Spark's tenth novel is a portrait of insanity nearly as stark as madness itself. The heroine is Lise, a 34-year-old spinster who has worked in the same office in a North European city for 16 years. Having bought herself an ugly traveling outfit, she sets out for an unnamed southland ostensibly for a vacation, but really to find someone willing to kill...
Textbook Psychosis. Muriel Spark has written another riveting small novel that displays her elliptical style and uncanny control of an abruptly shifting narrative. As always, too, she is something of a conundrum. Critics have likened her to writers as varied as Isak Dinesen and Evelyn Waugh. Normally confident commentators grope helplessly to describe the seductions of her stories, citing her wit, her urbanity, her Roman Catholic convictions...