Word: battlement
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...watching; but the reason both films work so well is that Lester is satirizing not merely that outdated movie form, the heavily romanticized historical spectacle, but history itself. When Lester's people fall off horses or into mud puddles, scramble about trying to have a picnic on a battlement, or try to duel on an icy river where they cannot even stand up, the reason is not that the director finds pratfalls irresistible. Instead, each and every character is a zealot, convinced not only that whatever cause he happens to be serving will change the course of human affairs...
Without departing too much from convention, the production shifts some of its attention from Othello to the man who drives the tragedy: Iago. Plotting on the edge of Thomas Parry's ingenious set (a terraced and tiered battlement of slabs that interlock in five different "scenes,") Ralph Pochoda (as Iago) beguiles the audience only a little less than he does his victims onstage. In the process of driving Othello to Desdemona's murder, he fleeces Roderigo with confidence-inspiring volubility. The objections of Desdemona's wishful suitor (played aptly by Rick Carey as a puppyish windvane to Iago's rhetorical...