Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Francis on many an interminable nature-walk, any tenuous suspension of disbelief crumbles. Although Zeffirelli spares us cinematic tricks of visions and revelations, his harping on a band of post-adolescent outcasts of society, in search of their lost youth and a Rousseauian utopia, mars the simplicity of the tale just as badly. Treating the legend of St. Francis as a Christian fairy-tale might well have served Zeffirelli's artistic talents better than this poorly conceived Whole Earth Catalogue of the life, loves and politics of Italy's patron saint...
This desperate inventiveness does not make a familiar tale interesting. It simply weighs it down under a load of cacophonously clanking symbols. As a director, Eastwood is not as good as he seems to think he is. As an actor, he is probably better than he allows himself to be. Meanwhile, the best you can say for High Plains Drifter is that the title is a low pun. Rarely are humble westerns permitted to drift around on such a highfalutin plane. That, however, is small comfort as this cold, gory and overthought movie unfolds...
...Soldier's Tale, Stravinsky began to take music away from the academicians, the esthetes, and the rapturous-on-demand, and to give it back to the people. The plot, which C.F. Ramuz set down in inspired doggerel, is a folk tale: a soldier sells his fiddle to the devil, and returns home to find that years have passed and everyone has forgotten him. He tricks the devil, cures a princess, and marries her, but the devil warns him not to try to go back to his native village. He tries anyway. The return of music to the people doesn...
Perhaps not since Bach put all of music into The Well-Tempered Clavier had a composer trusted dance as implicitly as Stravinsky in The Soldier's Tale. And because he trusted it -- because he knew the rhythms would keep on dancing happily at his listeners' eardrums -- like Bach, he let the parts interact as freely and as clashingly as they wanted to, without needing to worry about whether people would be able to follow it. So with the dance, intellect came back into music, and with it the sometimes painful irony that contemporary history entailed...
...IMPORTANCE of the dance is plainest when The Soldier's Tale is staged, because there's a long dance at the end of the first part. In this production, the dance, like everything else, is excellent. Eleanor Lindsay, the director, has Marie Kohler rise from her illness slowly, turning first to Bernard Holmberg, the Narrator, and only at his direction, timidly, and then with increasing delight, to the Soldier, Terry Emerson. Kohler can dominate the stage just by putting on her cloak; and Holmberg and Pope Brock as the Devil are virtually as good as the other...