Word: tableau
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Houses Afloat. Allen accumulates the details until his account reads like one repeating tableau of purple waves, elms falling, houses collapsing, corpses in shoes and socks-all other clothes having literally blown off. Only the very sturdy and the very fragile seemed to survive, like the Sandwich glass and blue china dug up later on one New England beach...
...wives. When the eldest of his three sons was married last summer, all the Bailey women showed up and cheerfully posed with Lee for a group snapshot, each of them holding up one, two or three fingers to indicate their sequence in the This Was Bailey's Life marital tableau. He is a lavish Christmas gift-giver, distributing houses, cars, a house trailer and trips to his parents, wife, ex-wives, in-laws and children. But he sees few of them regularly?except for Lynda, who travels almost everywhere with him and sometimes serves as his personal secretary...
...grotesque forms of the hanged above the melee, pausing to observe the ironic inscription from Auschwitz which overlooks the courtyard: Arbeiten macht frei. Through this domain of death stalks its mistress, an obese female commandant whose impassive visage makes her the least human element of the picture. The tableau brings to mind Dante's Inferno as Goya or Bosch might have rendered it, but without any air of conscious imitation...
...FACT, this grand tableau is only the beginning of Wertmuller's investigation. Seven Beauties is a film about choices, choices exercised within a situation whose constraints are stark to the point of absoluteness. In effect, Pasquale and the other inmates must choose either to do whatever may be necessary to survive, however vile, or be willing to die. Pasquale's character is defined by his acceptance of this choice, by his willingness to do anything in order to live. As a low level Mafioso in pre-war Naples, known as Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) because of his inexplicable success with...
Maybe Bronson gets his lift from the visuals, then: he looks like a statue placed perfectly to fill in these scenes. Indeed, if there's one problem with Hill's tableau, it's that the period stuff looks a little stagy and flat (less so than most contemporary American movies set in the urban thirties, The Sting, Lady Sings the Blues, etc., but tacky compared to what the Europeans can do, maybe because they have the buildings and untouched sections of cities to do it with). In this case perhaps Bronson-the beaten face, the mistrustful eyes-is just another...