Word: ophelia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...books. Each weds his own deepest inadequacy, his for love, hers for learning. In an exquisitely modulated performance, Barbara Loden never mimics Marilyn Monroe so far as to mock her, and when the self-destructive ordeal of drink and barbiturates begins, she becomes as pitiably touching as the drowning Ophelia...
...Ophelia has men in her madness. In her last scene, she flings her dress up over her head with sexual ardor before a group of soldiers. "This vivid contrast to her initial purity," says Zeffirelli, "shows that in the mind of every middle-class well-bred girl the thought of sex exists in its wildest form...
...take for U.S. actors to measure up to it were swiftly revealed on opening night. Director Guthrie elected to do an uncut Hamlet in modern dress, and he provided some of the eye-catchers that make purists accuse him of being a theatrical prankster: mourners with black umbrellas at Ophelia's burial; a Laertes who waves a revolver in Claudius' face and a Claudius who gets the revolver and slyly pockets the cartridges, like a silent-movie badman. If Guthrie seems to scramble his props, mixing candles with flashlights, snap-brim fedoras with Kaiser Wilhelm helmets...
...buttoned-down shirt, a bland suburbanite puzzled by the mess he is in, but with no hint of being the terrible plaything of destiny. He is the nice boy who always got good marks at Wittenberg U., never dented the family convertible, was engaged to that sweet Ophelia girl next door, and then inexplicably got his name splashed all over the tabloids by his revolting behavior toward his mother and girl friend, not to mention that gory mass-murder spree. One can hear the neighbors saying, "Hamlet was always such a polite, quiet boy. I'll never understand...
...scene of Cassandra's clairvoyance and departure to death ever been equalled? If so, where? Ophelia's mad scene is, by comparison, that of a namby-pamby nitwit. To the great credit of Mr. Arunah Brady be it said that he was able to convey much of its pity and terror. This scene has everything. She is not mad; on the contrary, she is the one person sane. Seeress, she can see the crimes already wreaked under that roof, and foresee the two about to follow, the murder of Agamemnon and of herself. Her speeches begin with little more than...