Word: characterize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Professor Seltzer begins his introduction to the American Signet edition of the play, "The modern student of Troilus and Cressida -reader, spectator, and actor-is faced with complex problems of staging, character, and moral ideas." One suspects he wrote this before his attempted production; at any rate, its truth cannot...
The "problem" of inconsistency of character, which arises particularly in Cressida's and Pandarus' case, was dealt with by Barton in sexual terms. Cressida was initially innocent yet boundlessly lustful, and her night with Troilus initiated her into a physicality which dictated her subsequent falseness. Pandarus was a glib, leering...
It takes an effort of mind to recall the time, not so very long ago, when America was still something like a collection of small towns, and a provincial newspaperman named Henry Louis Mencken was its national cracker-barrel atheist. It is, moreover, a matter for wonder that Mencken, who...
In three later pictures, The Apartment (1960), Irma La Douce (1963), and The Fortune Cookie (1966), Wilder again provides nice sympathetic victims (Jack Lemmon in the first two, Ron Rich in the latter). But, perhaps to counteract this, he makes the victimizers increasingly grotesque. Walter Matthau's conniving lawyer Whiplash...
Instead he joins a group of aristocrats in a country mansion. During their extended party the tangled relationships between them proliferate. The drama becomes a monstrous pattern without order, filled with action which develops only to greater confusion and triviality. The mansion is a collection of rooms we cannot fit...