Word: prioress
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...medical missionary? After all, she has been giving injections to grapefruits, practicing for the day when she can inoculate a native without flinching. Should all that citrus go to waste? Helping and hindering her in her decision are Ricardo Montalban as a priest, Greer Garson as her mother prioress and Ed Sullivan as himself. Sullivan, who has but two expressions, intense pain and acute embarrassment, gets ample opportunity to display both...
...material for the theatre. He deftly compresses the time span between the arrival of Father Urbain Grandier (Jason Robards, Jr.) in Loudon and his cremation at the stake for sorcery. In addition, he juxtaposes crucial scenes with each other. While Grandier refuses to confess under torture, his false accuser, Prioress Jeanne (Anne Bancroft) soliloquizes on her sins at the other side of the stage...
Whiting also creates a character of his own, a sewer worker, whose humble earthiness eventually teaches Grandier to find God in his fellow man. Whiting purposely contrasts the sewerman's habitual obscenities with both the eloquence of Grandier and the blasphemies of the hysterical Prioress. While the sewermen explains to Grandier about the caged bird he holds before him in the sewer to detect poisonous fumes, Grandier steps non-chalantly over an open manhole. Later Grandier will be imprisoned and sacrificed like the bird. Such subtle touches paint a picture of a man who constantly defies fortune and of whom...
Whiting's characterization reaches its peak with the Prioress. We first see her kneeling in prayer to God the Father like a child before her bedstead. Unresolved Oedipal problems combined with her throbbing sex drives cause her to fall in love with Father Grandier in her fantasy. When he refuses to become her Confessor, her love changes to hatred and she half-consciously destroys him with accusations. Soon the childishness that lingers in every woman, so pronounced in this neurotic, turns credibly and terrifyingly into hysterics...
...role of the raving Prioress should rightfully contrast with the sane and balanced Grandier, but Anne Bancroft still overplays it. Her Prioress believes too completely in her demoniac possesion, so we miss that nether-land between consciousness and unconsciousness in which the real Soeur Jeanne acted. Miss Bancroft also plays the unpossessed sequences with an overflowing wholesomeness, while Huxley discloses her character as both bitter and shallow...