Word: shakespeareanisms
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...Martin Dysart (Burton) musing about the complex case of his teenage patient Alan Strang (Firth), and a darkness-clothed scene of a naked Strang standing beside a horse, the object of his near psychotic obsession. Lumet fills his lens with Dysart's ruminating face, punctuating the narrative with the Shakespearean soliloquies of the confused shrink. At times, these infrequent monologues border on the histrionic, as Burton casts off the necessary restraint of a film star and takes on the exaggerated inflections of a stage actor's voice. But on balance, the technique succeeds, enabling Burton to dedge up the personal...
While they are not perhaps so powerful as the two main leads, the rest of the cast is generally of an equally high caliber. As the Herald, Jonathan Prince provides the closest thing to sanity in the play; he is almost a Shakespearean jester, providing a sarcastic, witty window into the inmates' world. Prince is perfect in the role, pointing out the foibles of first, the inmates, then the director, never clearly on one side or the other. The four alcoholics who provide a musical Greek chorus to Marat's saga are also good in the not-quite-organized fashion...
...Barbarian--shades of Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan epics. Despite his typecasting for the role, Schwarzenegger has been taking acting lessons for some time, even though he says he knows how to act. After all, acting is supposed to be natural these days since it has "gotten away from that Shakespearean way, delivering the lines in a weird...
Spence Taylor and Herb Larsen provide comic relief to comic relief in the Shakespearean characters of Henry, an aging, vain, forgettable actor and his companion Mortimer, whose specialty is spectacularly acrobatic feigned death. They are hilarious in their early scenes, and successfully make the transformation to guileful roughnecks in the second...
...play to honor their sovereign's wedding. He cast them as journeymen actors arduously bent on not missing a cue while botching up a scene. With their comic earthiness, they very nearly steal the show. As for lofty gravity and the true melodic rendering of the Shakespearean line, Maggie Smith is one of the sweetest singers this side of Avon...