Word: thrall
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...Room to unleash the comedic genius held in check by uptight Captain Mandrake and the Boy Scout president. His Dr. Strangelove is the crazed head of the American weapons program, apparently because he considers it the closest modern equivalent to his beloved Third Reich. Strangelove holds the audience in thrall as he goes further over the top with every line, straining in his wheelchair to extract himself from the death grip of his own right hand, a powerful character actor in its own right. This is the classic Sellers--black leather glover a demonic twinkle...
...Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound, this play does not give the narrator a penchant for candor. We hear little about how this way of working helped or hurt his craft, satisfied or thwarted his soul. Structurally, the piece owes much to Biloxi: a group in thrall to a dangerous leader, a boot camp that hardens the head more than the heart, a tense scene where some teammate is to be unjustly cast out, a summing-up of everyone's future fate. But Biloxi had tragic overtones, while Laughter on the 23rd Floor is comedy, comedy...
...kill you." But none is more harrowing than the moment of Ike's killer kiss. It shows how tender a man's domination can seem and how a woman, prodded by terror and responsibility, can see no option except acceding to his abuse. The happy ending -- escape from his thrall, sanity restored, a career of her own -- comes later...
...that defines the world in terms of post-cold-war economic realities. The John Kennedy parallel is inescapable -- how vividly his sporting vitality contrasted with the solemn visages of Harold Macmillan, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. Once again it seems apt to recall William Wordsworth's lines in thrall of the French Revolution: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven...
This film, like Duras's script for the 1959 Hiroshima Mon Amour, is a rueful East-West romance dredged from the writer's life. This no-name affair is a last tango in Saigon -- but with the man in thrall, not in control. The girl, who insists she is having sex only because the money her lover gives her helps support her family, knows the stronger partner is always the one who loves less. The man (Tony Leung, a wonderful Hong Kong actor) is singed, happily, by the flame of his ardor. His naked vulnerability is just...