Word: ophelias
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...hero of this novel ferries forth on the river Styx as matter-of-factly as if he were boating at a church social. Floyd Walker is a handsome, 32-year-old bank teller-and sparetime choirmaster-who has leukemia. With apologetic hems and haws, the town doctor of Ophelia, Mo. announces the sentence: three months, more or less, to live. In sleepy little Ophelia (pronounced "afailure") the drama of life has no acts, only intermissions, and Floyd is scarcely prepared for center stage in the town's morbidly engaged affections. He makes only one promise to himself: "From...
...king and court of Shakespeare's Elsinore, argues Author West, represent all governments, all men. Nobody has clean hands. Ophelia is usually presented on the stage as a convent-type sweetie who has a nervous breakdown; in fact she is just "a disreputable young woman," a docile pawn in her father's plot to match her with Eligible Bachelor Hamlet. "No line in the play suggests that she felt either passion or affection for him." Even the ghost of Hamlet's father is tainted, as Author West sees it: he is the voice of the past...
...chiller, when Fernand Ravinel's wife refuses to dissolve their unhappy marriage through divorce, his doctor-mistress Monique suggests dissolving it through murder. As the efficient Monique drowns the wife in a bathtub and then makes her appear to drown in a stream-a Lady Macbeth superintending an Ophelia's fale -a scared Fernand quivers like jelly and wobbles like a tenpin. And then, when he can hardly stay on his feet, he suddenly discovers that...
...with an immensely rich, exceedingly harassed, many-times-married heiress. All about her Palm Beach house are nest-featherers and heiress-fleecers: aunts and doctors and private secretaries, former and future husbands. The heiress herself is usually up and about by midafternoon, a sort of party-girl Ophelia given to the champagne shakes. Then a visiting poet takes her for a day in the sunshine and bids her go away and find herself...
Among the other principals, the most engaging are Edith Iselin, as Ophelia, and Richard Smithies, as Polonius. Miss Iselin plays Ophelia with a youthful lightness that is often quite charming in its novelty. If we don't usually think of Ophelia as a young girl, Miss Iselin shows that she can be. As for Smithies, he gives what is probably his best performance to date. His Polonius is restrained but generally pleasant. Due in large part to their work and that of Marc Brugnoni, in the role of the first grave-digger, the comicscenes are perhaps the most effective part...