Word: theo
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From the moment that the Welles character. Theo Van Horn, appears, with eyes flashing powerfully above the salt-and-pepper beard, and puts his arm around his son Charles (Anthony Perkins) in a mastering gesture, the comparison with Citizen Kane becomes unavoidable. Welles is just as much of a force here, but Theo's story is hardly that of a good man brought low, it is not a tragedy like Kane's. Through ten days of intense action. Theo remains unchanging. He merely reveals more and more of himself becoming more of a god and less...
Charles, a sometime sculptor, goes home because he psychologically cannot escape from his father and brings with him his friend Paul (Michel Piccolt) a philosophy professor. Paul soon learns that Theo has tried to freeze all life on his estate as it was in the fall of 1925. Theo's young wife Helene (Marlene Jobert), whom he picked to become his bridge while she was still a child dresses in twenties style and is chauffeured about in an elderly limousine. Charles too is impressed into this pattern of dress and life, and into total submission to the father. Theo wants...
...CHARLES'S EYES, his father is God, Jehovah, the God of stern justice, the most extreme form of the classic Freudian father. Tall, lanky, looking like a ragged page boy. Charles can only smile quiveringly in his father's presence. Theo blocks Charles from finding his own identity: Theo has told him, whether truthfully or not, that he is a foundling, and his real parents unknown, killed by lightning--Jehovah's staff...
Letters from Charles to Helene have been stolen, and Charles must take from his father's safe to pay the blackmailer. Theo of course discovers the loss, and the absence of a diamond necklace which Helene has Paul pawn to meet a second demand. Then, Helene is murdered. Charles rushes downstairs to his studio, topples a great god-like statue wielding lightning bolts-his father as Jehovah--and impales himself on the spiked fence below the window...
...lovers are Charles and Helene (Perkins and Marlene Jobert), the adopted children of a dotty millionaire tyrant named Theo Van Horn (Welles). Papa has used his fortune to re-create meticulously the year 1925. "It was an exciting time to be alive," he explains over his nightly gourmet repast, glaring balefully around the table at anyone who might offer a contradiction. Charles has to romp about the estate in knickers, but takes some solace in sculpting huge, brooding Olympian figures. Helene is something of a stiff, a quality convincingly conveyed by Miss Jobert, who shuffles through the film...