Word: witch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bacall is not overly reflective about her times. She has a few standard warnings about the danger of Communist witch hunts. But mainly she clicks off the events and people in her life with the diligent rhythms of the Twentieth Century Limited, which she had boarded in 1943 to start her film career. The exception is when she recounts Bogart's stoic struggle with terminal cancer. Here her prose becomes spare and piercing: "I sat with him, had coffee-he still couldn't forget the night before. I asked him if he felt better...
...accept the frailty of human nature or commit oneself to abolishing original sin through death. Whether love and passionate commitment to ideals can evoke significant change in the ways of man and the universe. All these are woven into a complex sequence of events, including an imminent wedding, a witch-hunt, and the arrival of a self-proclaimed criminal. The confusion created by these events is hardly as noteworthy as the questions thereby inspired. Without the spark of life necessary to good drama, the issues are cast into the realm of the abstract, relegated to the shelf like books...
Veronica Lewis's accused witch Jennet Jourdemayne appropriately sparkles like a jewel, lighting up her surroundings with painted cheeks and wild eyes, desparate, martyred gesticulations, and bright brocaded cape and gown. Her entrance in the first act rescues it from tedium, and in subsequent scenes Lewis outclasses the other players in dramatic ability and depth of character. Only in the last act does she fail to hold her own, lapsing into moon-eyed fatuousness at Jeffrey Harper's words of love...
...built a career on his theories of conspiracies behind the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Lane charged that members of the Peoples Temple had to flee the U.S. because of "religious persecution" by the Government and implied that Ryan was engaged in a "witch hunt." If this continued, he said, the temple might move to either of two countries that do not have "friendly relations" with the U.S. (presumably Russia and Cuba), and this would prove "most embarrassing" for the U.S. Lane asked that the trip be postponed until he was free to accompany Ryan. Ryan...
...certain passionate rationality. In the 17th century, Russian Orthodox dissenters called the Old Believers refused to accept liturgical reforms. Over a period of years some 20,000 peasants in protest abandoned their fields and burned themselves. In East Africa before World War I, when Tanganyika was a German colony, witch doctors of the Maji-Maji movement convinced tribesmen that German bullets would turn to water; they launched an uprising, and the credulous were slaughtered...