Word: portrayal
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Terence Stamp, as Billy Budd, is authentically simple. When he prefaces his hanging with the slightly reminiscent cry, "God bless Captain Vere," he does not portray Christ; he is a touching, naive sailor unable to understand the evil around him. He seems insanely stupid, yet real, when he fails to understand Claggart's malice and vengeful eyes...
Claggart (played by Robert Ryan) himself cannot comprehend the spectacle before him; he forces himself to see evil in Billy. In a pathetic scene, he exhorts Squeak to portray Budd as a mutineer. Ryan plays the perfect villain; watching a whipping delights him to the point of ecstasy...
Girlhood Granny. Yet, simple as she tried to portray herself, she was a complicated woman with an agonizingly complex background. Her mother, Mrs. Anna Hall Roosevelt, was a beautiful lady with little capacity for motherhood. Eleanor remembered standing in the parlor doorway at home as a child, "often with my finger in my mouth." and hearing her mother tell visitors: "She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned that we always call her Granny." Recalled Eleanor, "I wanted to sink through the floor in shame...
Novelist Bell writes this way, and it must have seemed to him that the technique was ideally suited to his scheme, which was to portray a marriage as the turbulent confluence of two mighty streams of lineage. Daniel (Southerner, painter, battler with Furies) and Lucy (descendant of Philadelphians, Quaker, placid repository of honor) have been married for several years when family duty demands a temporary separation. He flies to Mississippi to straighten out the affairs of a dotty aunt; she travels to the bedside of a stern Quaker uncle. The distance between husband and wife and their return to their...
Being Russians, his contemporaries were not put off by Chekhov's lack of plot. What they could not forgive was his apparent lack of message. But Chekhov, who was dogmatic about little else, was dead sure of his literary methods. "In order to portray horse thieves," Chekhov explained. "I must speak and think as they would. You would like me to say: 'The stealing of horses is bad.' Surely this has long since been known without my saying...