Word: paranoiacs
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Ivan the Terrible: Part 2-The Revolt of the Boyars. The late Sergei Eisenstein's contrived but lush portrait of a power-mad paranoiac, made while Stalin was still alive but only recently released by the Russian government...
...Part 2 -in which Ivan's purge of the boyars presents an obvious parallel to Stalin's purge of the party-that the spectator can only wonder how the director managed to escape with a mere reprimand. As Cherkassov plays him, Ivan-Stalin is a full-blown paranoiac and power maniac, and his hysterical protest that his crimes have been committed "not for myself, but for the motherland'' has the ring and the glare of madness...
...piano manufacturer, Rolfe became a Roman Catholic convert at 26, studied for the priesthood but was expelled from his seminary in Rome. For the rest, he was a weirdly gifted writer, schoolmaster, painter, photographer, workhouse inmate, homosexual, paranoiac, and perhaps the most merciless autobiographer ever to snarl at his own image. In his famed, partly autobiographical novel, Hadrian the Seventh, Rolfe created a fantasy in which the College of Cardinals chooses as Pope an expelled English novice (like himself) who reforms the church and the world, and dies a martyr. In The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Rolfe told...
...return of Jimmy's wife, which is motivated less metaphysically by their powerful sexual love. It is hard to imagine any other motivation being sufficiently strong, for Jimmy is a bad lot: a slander-mouthed railer, a malicious, nasty, monstrously selfish barbarian, and a bit of a paranoiac as well. His creator views him with a bracingly cool eye, never veiling him in a romantic haze, never losing his objectivity, explaining but not excusing. Since the author never loses sight of the fact that his hero is a "bloody bastard," the audience can hate Jimmy Porter without being annoyed...
...flag retroactively over the American Revolution. He "saw the Communists as the bravest and most skillful fighters for man's freedom." Now he says, "I was mistaken," but it took him nearly 14 years-until Khrushchev's mid-1956 "secret report" of Stalin's "paranoiac blood lust"-to realize his mistake. His fumbling book of remorse and recantation is pervaded by pathos. "Why?" he keeps asking in hurt, "say-it-ain't-so, Joe" tones, but Joe long ago gave the definitive answer: "The truncheon-beat, beat, beat, beat, and then beat again...