Word: verismo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week the Metropolitan Opera offered a few clues as it staged a new production of Riccardo Zandonai's hot-blooded thriller Francesca da Rimini. First performed in 1914, Francesca was one of a number of works that attempted to transcend romantically the naturalistic action of verismo, using the more advanced harmonic language and orchestral technique of Wagner to create a new direction for opera. In La Fanciulla del West (1910), Puccini had pointed the way, and several younger men were eager to inherit his mantle: Italo Montemezzi, with L'Amore del Tre Re (1913); Ildebrando Pizzetti, with...
...everyone in Romero's Paisley pageant is so nice that no true conflict arises. The movie begins in a splash of delirious lyricism-King William (Ed Harris), naked, birching himself clean in a sylvan lake before mounting his trusty motorsteed-then bogs down in 145 minutes of psychological verismo. The writer-director wants to present rounded, sympathetic characters but never allows them to develop beyond the caricatures in Reel 1. Romero, whose early films displayed the carnographic brio of the E.C. horror comic books of the '50s, has gone classic-or, at least, Classics Comics. Even his talent...
...film dispenses with the machismo verismo of Luchino Visconti's 1942 Ossessione and the platinum-blinded glitz of the 1946 version starring John Garfield and Lana Turner to concentrate on a purposefully paced retelling of Cain's story. It means to calibrate every movement in the desperate mating dance of Frank and Cora, "these unspeakably stupid, very simple people, filled with guile and tenderness." That is Director Rafelson's phrase, spoken without contempt for his characters but with an understanding of their selfish, consuming needs. Though Nick's café is just a short drive from...