Word: wail
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Another distressing note is a persistent background wail that is apparently music supposed to heighten the film's dramatic impact. Instead, the sound evokes visions of some poor soul being tortured in the Tower of London by Vincent Price. The film's ultimate effect, as Mishkin would say, is enough to drive an audience meshugge...
...Created Great Whales began with muttering string noises and a submarine roar on the drums, followed by leviathan trombones diving in and out of rushing violins. Finally the great cetaceans themselves appeared, via tape recording. They sang with an astounding range of tone and expressiveness-from a stratospheric wail that might have come from the throat of a 40-ton canary to the rumble of a stupendous Model T with a cracked muffler. As background the tapes carried the sound of ocean waves, which Hovhaness skillfully blended with cymbals and gongs. The whales were accompanied by whooping brass glissandi, glockenspiels...
...comes off to reveal a yarmulke on his head. His upper-class speech breaks down into a breathy canine laugh or into red-faced rages of snarling and spitting. Once, after his humiliation in court, his dignity falls away completely and he lapses offstage into a piercing primeval wail of lamentation. Disappointingly to some, this is as near as Olivier comes in this characterization to performing at full classical pitch. Nor does he modulate to softer emotions. He tears angrily through the "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech, from which most Shylocks wring the last drop of pathos...
...timbre of the African voice and the listening habits of the African ear. So there is a de'z and do'z of slave speech sounding beneath our most polished Harvard accents, and if there is such a thing as a Yale accent, there is a Negro wail in it-doubtlessly introduced there by Old Yalie John C. Calhoun, who probably got it from his mammy...
...standard prima donna marking pentameters until her next big speech. She is a vain coquette who is first delighted with her body when it attracts the King, then distressed and finally destroyed by it when, as Queen, she fails to produce the necessary male heir. Her doomed wail, "Oh my God, the King is mad!" almost redeems the whole overblown epic. Yet it is Bujold's very sexuality that makes her question the validity of her role as a chaste but tantalizing nymphet in the early scenes. "I don't believe that a girl like Anne Boleyn...