Word: sahibs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ustinov has chosen to view hippiedom as the social dawn of a New Jerusalem. A very pukka Sahib general (played with quaint and artful foxiness by Anthony Quayle) comes home from liquidating the white man's bumbling in Malaysia, only to find that his son and daughter have become neoprimitive natives of swinging England. His daughter (Margaret Linn) is complacently pregnant-by whom, she cannot be sure. His bearded guitar-laden son (Sam Waterston) looks "like a leftover from the Last Supper," and his so-called mistress is a breastless, hipless, bass-voiced androgyne. Ultimately, the general goes...
...floor, the chandelier is unlit, the glasses are broken, the cattle die of foot-and-mouth disease, and one of the lions is decapitated by one of the characters in a fit of rage. Colonial cafard-suffocating apathy-has set in. Nevertheless, Archie keeps up the forms of the sahib-settler's life. It is a gruesome parody of colonial ritual. There is tennis every afternoon with his daughter, after which they sit for the "sundowner" before dinner, served by a "boy" in a sashed uniform. But the tennis court has no lines, the "sundowner" is sickening peach brandy...
...frantic hero (Michael Crawford) is the kind of artist who fashions metallic sculptures that look as if they were conceived during a tin famine. Engaged to a very U deb (Lynn Redgrave), he is about to meet her very pukka sahib army colonel father (Peter Bull). Also expected is a millionaire art fancier with a notorious avidity for avant-garde junk. To impress the guests, Crawford and Redgrave have carted off the sculptor's jackdaw furniture and replaced it with elegant antiques "borrowed" from the neighboring apartment of an exquisitely gay bachelor (Donald Madden) supposedly away for the weekend...
...colonialism) on the line, "lesser breeds without the Law"; "This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the 'lesser breeds' are 'natives,' and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase 'lesser breeds' refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are 'without the Law' in the sense...
Chekhov had a gift for giving life to the life-sick which is somehow lacking in John Gielgud's curiously inanimate performance. The pukka sahib accents of the cast conjure up stiff-lipped Britons muddling through, rather than Russians sucked under in emotional quicksands. Chekhov's night music of the soul, so beautifully attuned in Director William Ball's 1958 off-Broadway revival, is jangled here. At its purest, it is an ineffable resonance of laughter and tears, making the whole world kin. It is unthinkable that anyone who loves Chekhov would miss the Gielgud production...