Comedians
A Harrowing of
Hell that depends on a specific construction to achieve its effect, that is,
Griffiths must show what comedy hell is, really, beyond any doubt.
He has another
line going, which is the business end, so to speak, you have to be funny, that’s
all, and it isn’t taught in night school even by the Lancashire Lad himself, retired.
The Lad went wet
over a tour conducted in East Germany of a death camp, that Schadenfreude
was too much.
His most
resistant student, disciple of Grock in “truth” says he, gets ice from Frost
and is all the wetter for it.
A Hindu butt of
somebody’s joke tells one of his own to the Lad and saves the day, something about
sacred cows, and there (if Dante is any guide) is the Hell and the Harrowing, a
very funny joke.
The
Imitation Game
As stated here by
a fictionalized Turing (Turner), the title is a proposed experiment meant to
demonstrate that a machine can think, or not.
Frinton, the ATS,
BP, known as Bletchley.
The itching
career of a suburban girl who finds excitement in the prospect of a German
invasion and wants to get into it, preferably running the show with maps and
charts and staff and all.
This is very
closely related to Losey’s Accident, perhaps identical, and very well directed
by Eyre on location.
Chekhov’s Madame
Bovary, in which the heroine lives to see the estate and orchard sold.
A very beautiful
production laid out with immense skill, exactly like a London stage play in the
most exact renderings of set design and lighting, and television direction of
the best.
Suddenly
Last Summer
The affair is
rather different in Mankiewicz’ film, here the violence directed toward the
witness is much more telling.
The rich old
cootie-catcher wants to drive away the senses of a niece who knows the truth
about her son, the poet of a season.
John J. O’Connor,
the television critic of the New York Times, took it for a cri de
cœur from somewhere.
Rockaby
Murphy rocks,
tied to his rocker, “mother rocker” here, to attain the stilly mind at all
points of Creation that is so like the act of poesis as described somewhere.
It’s arrived at
by a kind of song or rime, repeated with variations, of repeated
disappointments in the outer world, the great world Murphy calls it, a song of
the degrees.
Penelope Wilton
wonderfully made-up, chiming in on the voice from time to time, a perfect
expression. The direction enough to indicate the precision usefully.
Iris
The night was
coming in which no Murdoch could work, as Beckett might say.
Mind you, she was
a pain in the arse at Oxford. Later she became a genius of sorts, English
sorts.
Tony Blair is the
Prime Minister, an eminently forgettable fact, dullness is the rule of the day,
arseholes are everywhere.
The very fine
hand of Charles Wood is on the screenplay.
Elvis Mitchell
rated this as “moldy, minor-key melodrama” in a pan for the New York Times,
critics generally agreed, some of them liked it.