Word: pubs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...aging literary gents are discovered at wordplay in a womblike Edwardian salon. John Gielgud, the social-climbing guest, is a failed poet and garrulous pub bore. Host Ralph Richardson is a successful but dipsomaniacal belletrist blimp who keeps two menacing servants to guard against just such intrusions. Together these two titled mandarins of the stage are guiding us into Pinter-land, where words struggle to contain the open-ended flux of existence. Our journey through it is brilliantly illuminated by their partnership...
Well, there is a brawl in Brannigan, but it takes place in a humble pub, is poorly motivated and feebly staged. It says nothing at all relevant or original about the international clash of manners that the movie keeps edging toward and then backing away from. This seems all the more disappointing since the star himself appears fit and fresh and more than usually eager to have some fun with his image in a setting that is novel...
...simply a play about waiting. Mercier and Camier are waiting under the illusion that they have some place to go, though they do not know where or why. They keep returning home to look for lost possessions or items they have al ready junked as superfluous. Along the way, pub stops and a supporting cast of fellow grotesques help to pass the time. Characteristically, Beckett's acknowledgement of free will frames the novel's anticlimax. The two men have the option of spending the night in a moldering, deserted house or falling down from exhaustion: "Now we must...
...confiscatory? 106 per cent! That's beyond confiscation!") Did the brothers' social and political background help inform their eloquent list of the perquisites available to U.S. Senators, the highest paid legislators in the world? And in other cases, such influences may have been praiseworthy effects. If a pub debate about "Greatest Mass Killings" turned to the Guinness Book, its participants would learn that a Soviet radio station--source normally unknown to historical scholarship--once accused the Chinese People's Republic of killing 26.3 million people...
...other cases, however, the McWhirters are less friendly toward inflated claims. The pub debaters could learn from Guinness that "Professor Paul Rassinier, a Buchenwald survivor and holder of the Medialle de la Resistance, published evidence in 1964 to the effect that the total Jewish death count could not have exceeded 1,200,000, as opposed to the widely accepted figure of 6,000,000." But they would have to look up Rassinier's Le Veritable Prices Eichmann ou Les Vainqueurs incorrigibles (Paris, 1964) to learn the nature of the evidence--that the World Jewish Congress's pamphlet on the Eichmann...