Word: tyrants
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Father (Alan Webb) is a curmudgeonly tyrant nearing 80, marching with faltering step and bristling temper into his pitiable dotage. He has sapped the life out of his wife (Lillian Gish), bullied his middle-aged son (Hal Holbrook) into something resembling psychic impotence, and barred his door to a daughter (Teresa Wright) because she married a Jew. Except for the sense of mortality that makes every dying old man a portent of what lies in store for all humanity, there is no particular reason for anyone to care about this father. But Holbrook wants to love him, and tries...
...This tyrant whose name alone blisters our tongues...
...Minh: "I wished some of my violent countrymen could have such an opportunity. They would be convinced that George III has not one grain of tyranny in his composition. A man of his fine feelings, so good a husband, so kind a father cannot be a tyrant...
...critics was the fact that the Bolshoi's Boris captured not only the barbaric power of the work but also its subtle psychology. At the head of an effective cast, Basso Ivan Petrov projected passion better than pitch, but his booming, dramatically harrowing portrayal of the tormented tyrant was still a triumph...
...well. Blindly, stupidly, they still love him-the discarded wife, the girl friend whose family he once imprisoned, the aging professor whose career he ruined. In fact, Author Mnacko's outrage goes deeper than politics: with Swiftian anger, he condemns the victim as well as the tyrant. As a writer, however, he is no Swift. The novel is at times clumsy and dated: conversations are imagined by the narrator, glances between characters are supposed to be significant enough to stand for a paragraph or so of exposition, flashbacks fly off like the calendar pages in an old movie...