Word: swordplay
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Weaver's final duel with Macduff is much too tame, particularly for those who saw Christopher Plummer's breathtaking swordplay in Cyrano recently. At the end, he pulls out a dagger and seems about to commit suicide when he falls off a parapet; suicide is something no real Macbeth would entertain...
...inclusive application of energy and finesse is the night-time revel following Othello's arrival at Cyprus. A party of drunken soldiers and whores idle and sprawl with calculated precision to Iago's song-leading, and when Roderigo pursues an intoxicated Cassio (Michael Gurdy) onstage for some extravagant swordplay, the scene bursts into a Shakespearean streetfight. Hamlin's careful blocking makes every drunken soldier's drunken move part of one grand theatrical effect--and everything meshes neatly behind Cassio's supremely pathetic disclaimers of intoxication. Half the tension of the scene is in the swish of swords and the calculated...
...production, the final arbiter is the director. Michael Kahn (Merry Wives of Windsor) and Edward Payson Call (The Tempest) concentrate on horseplay, swordplay, and foul play, or foot play, arm play, and hand-and-wrist play. But of true drama they seem to have not the remotest inkling...
...apprehensions, 1968 is one that he awaits with eagerness. Next year will mark the centennial of the Meiji Restoration, the year that Japan broke out of its feudal, introspective cocoon and entered the real world. Since that time, the four islands of Nippon have moved from an era of swordplay and armor to one of supertankers and transistors...
Sheer exaggeration provides both the humor and the violence of Sanjuro. You see nine-men-plus-Mifune against a body of God-knows-how-many evil men. Mifune's swordplay in the slaughter scenes is so fake it's scarcely worth suspending your disbelief. Yet you don't think about that when he's slicing through whole screensful of villains. Unfortunately exaggeration is lacking where it most belongs, in the character of "Sanjuro," played by Mifune. He is good chiefly at two things: swaggering around scratching his neck, and jumping up and down hurling insults at his antagonists. Kurosawa doesn...