Word: rrenmatt
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...Visit is the kind of movie that leaves viewers wishing they had seen the play instead. On the screen, it is little more than a melodrama. On Broadway, as an unforgettable vehicle for the Lunts in 1958, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's drama drilled annihilating satire into a spare, pitiless tale of vengeance and greed...
Though the movie follows roughly the same plot, the darkly gleaming heart of it has undergone major surgery. In a postscript to his play, Dürrenmatt wrote: "Nothing could harm this comedy with a tragic end more than heavy seriousness." Director Bernhard Wicki falls into that error, compounding it with a gimmicky screenplay. The eunuchs, the coffin, and much of the mordant wit are omitted, as is the wooden leg. The sex angle is fattened up with a juicy subplot. And to make the slow corrosion of conscience more graphic, the good burghers of Guellen struggle against...
...more central question is how philosophically bleak is Duürrenmatt's own outlook? Is his an outraged castigation or an icy judgment? Is he saying how sadly corruptible is man, or calling life itself corrupt? In any case, not since Tennessee Williams' Camino Real has a new Broadway play conveyed so fanged and carniv orous a world. But where Williams traded in the very decadence and violence he seemed at war with, The Visit, whether or not philosophically in focus, never gets dramatically out of hand...
Playwright Duürrenmatt can well afford his bucolic luxury. Almost unknown in the U.S. until The Visit (although one novel, The Judge and His Hangman, was published by Harpers in 1955, and earlier this year an off-Broadway group presented his Fools Are Passing Through), Duürrenmatt is one of the best-known and most often performed writers in mid-Europe. Last season The Visit alone had 213 performances on eleven different German stages...