Word: slave
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Which is odd, since Langella looks as if he's been preening before one for the last 20 years. For Langella, Dracula is a haunted lover, a slave to his lust. He brings off the concept, while Richter and Badham whip up blood squalls around him. But the performance is a fraction of what it could have been. Maybe Langella is too good an actor to be frittered away on the screen. I don't mean that as an insult to films, but where else can an actor with no technical resources--a Jack Nicholson (good...
When The Confessions of Nat Turner was published twelve years ago, William Styron was pilloried by some blacks and liberals. How, their attack ran, dare a white Southerner appropriate the mind and soul of a black slave? Sophie's Choice, Styron's first novel since then, may prompt a similar ambush. What business has an American Wasp writing about the European, chiefly Jewish, victims of the Holocaust? If taken seriously, such questions are dangerous. Areas of the imagination can be fenced off for certain groups alone only at everyone's peril. The question is not whether Styron...
...fully believe what the Nazis did. A young Virginian nicknamed Stingo is in New York, trying to write a first novel. He is callow in the ways of most aspiring authors but feels guilty about living off his small inheritance, since the money can be traced back to a slave sold by his family nearly a century earlier. Stingo takes a room in a Brooklyn boardinghouse and soon be comes involved with two other tenants: Nathan Landau, an American Jew, and Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish Gentile who bears on her arm a tattooed number from Auschwitz. Sophie is Nathan...
Many of the actors carry multiple roles, but the best of the supporting quick change artists is undoubtedly Paris Barclay as the Baron of Thunder Ten Troncke, the Grand Inquisitor, the Slave Driver and a Sheik. Even in these bit roles, Barclay's stage presence steals every scene. His subtle gestures and expressions turn his characters in minor tours de force...
...ever-willing Paquette, bubbles guilelessly along, creating an enjoyable caricature. Stephen Hayes starts a bit shakily as Maximillian, Candide's foppish foster brother, but he becomes more convincing with each episode until he shines in a wonderful passage with the Governor in which he gets sold as a female slave only to have his coconuts exposed at the last minute. Hayes sometimes fails to sing loudly enough, but his acting eventually makes up for that...