Word: inquisitor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sjostrom has been criticized for not emphasizing the "heartless coldness" that Borg's daughter-in-law alleges to exist in him. However, while she is a compelling inquisitor, the daughter-in-law is an impassioned--and perhaps obtuse--observer, who need not be believed. Bergman's direction of Sjostrom seemed quite valid in every respect...
Prokofiev's music, written in the early '205, is taut, economical and superbly dramatic, consisting of almost continuous recitative, punctuated with an occasional soaring aria. The opera reaches its vocal and dramatic climax in the Inquisition scene, in which Renata. a group of nuns and the Inquisitor weave eleven different vocal lines into a complicated polyphony, terminated by a staggering explosion of brass and cymbals...
Then Freeport's Williams did something that widely irritated official Washington and raised many an eyebrow in business circles. He hired an ex-FBI investigator to question Beynon's old friends and associates about his private life as far back as 1926. Beynon testified that the inquisitor asked his friends such questions as "I'd like to know how Mr. Beynon made his money." Williams also checked police records on Beynon, but all he could dig up was a traffic violation. Explained Williams: "It's normal business practice for me to find...
...characters are similarly transformed. Ivan, the tormented intellectual of the novel, becomes an easy atheist in the movie and finds God and the true faith on the witness stand, when brought to testify against his brother: he is not the man who could have composed the masterful "Grand Inquisitor" or struggled with the devil himself near the close of the novel. The precariously saintly Alexey Karamazov is transformed into a sort of religious straight man, whose feeble pietisms and meaningful stares represent the religious instruction of the movie, and the idiot Smerdyakov becomes a shrewd, calculating, vengeful spirit who falls...
...movie as a representation of the novel fails completely except for Cobb's performance. There is no Grand Inquisitor, none of the sequences from the portion of the novel called "The Boys," and the climactic trial scene contains none of the excitement and meaning which Dostoevsky was able to give it. As the movie ends, Ivan finds God; Dmitri finds Girl; cold, old Katya finds nothing; and Alexey finds that the workings of God are, as we long suspected, inscrutable...