Word: portrait
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JAMES BOSWELL: THE EARLIER YEARS, by Frederick A. Pottle. Johnson's Boswell comes stunningly to life in this warm portrait of a rakish genius...
...petty-bourgeois Pharaoh. But as the props become more animated, the people become more desiccated. The insides of Ionesco's characters are like the outsides of computers. It is only a step from their interchangeable rhinoplastic noses to their look-alike Rhinoceros horns. Ionesco has drawn a devastating portrait of the Unnoticeables...
...resemblance of Madness to Bondomania is otherwise superficial, Director Irvin Kershner savors the joke to excess. The rest of Elliott Baker's screenplay, adapted from his own 1964 novel and filmed with careful fidelity on the seedy side of Manhattan, is a fitfully funny satire based on a portrait of the artist as the natural enemy of all Establishment norms. This voguish half-truth worked well enough in book form, where nearly every character was a well-managed mass of lunatic impulses. In the movie, everyone seems to be racing against the threat of imminent condensation. Director Kershner pounces...
...puritanical and humorless Malvolio, the square peg in the play's round hole, wears a long black gown and sports a moustache and goatee, looking for all the world as though he had just been sitting for a sober portrait by Van Dyck or Rembrandt. Feste the Clown is dressed in pink and rose, and makes use of hand-pup-sets. The earnest Viola first appears is dark gold; but when she disguises herself as the page Cesario, both she and her twin brother Sebatian (each believing the other drowned) are clothed in white-ruffed cerulean, exuding the purity...
...been supplied by the man best qualified to write it: Yale's Frederick A. Pottle, 68, who for 37 years has served as custodian and editor of the Boswell papers. With phrases and perceptions long seasoned in sensibility, he builds a warm, complex and radically altered portrait of his subject. The face shows the same old clutter of confusions: arrogance, snobbery, priggery, pushiness, stinginess, grossness, rampant infantilism. But behind the confusions, Pottle perceives the fundamental fear and hunger in the man and, more acutely than any earlier biographer, discerns his peculiar powers: the geysering energy, the shimmering charm...