Word: borgias
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...involved, plucking the particular little pill box that your hand has settled on, then standing politely in a row, ready to pay for your medicine. The trouble with poison is that you take it yourself, even when the murderer has spiked the gum on the envelope or when a Borgia has switched the wine. It is the victim who does the actual killing. That is why moviemakers focus so carefully on the glass of smoky milk jiggling on the silver tray as it progresses up the winding staircase toward the invalid wife. They know that we will want to follow...
Television may do for businessmen what a Borgia banquet did for casual dining. From Dallas' oily antihero J.R. Ewing on down, most businessmen on television are depicted as crooks, amoral wheeler-dealers, criminals with Mafia connections, cheats, employers of professional arsonists and, worse still, jerks, clowns and buffoons. With the exception of Margaret Pynchon, the gracious owner of the Los Angeles Tribune on Lou Grant, nowhere on prime time is there anyone remotely resembling such constructive businessmen as Joseph C. Wilson of Xerox, Edwin Land of Polaroid, Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors or Thomas Watson...
...teenager, she ran through lovers like a bull on the pampas; as Senora Perón, she stalked the corridas of power, sniffing for the blood of old enemies. Young Eva told a colleague she wanted to play the great ladies of history: Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Lucrezia Borgia. Her wish was her destiny and her doom. Fate and a will of steel cast her as the avatar of all these women, and when she died her grieving lover was the nation...
...soldiers and civilians he meets along the Via Dolorosa. Half of them are Americans, half Ambolanders; three are women. (All are played by Bob Gunton.) These "historical events" serve as avatars and parodies of the looking-glass warriors, and most of them are perversely delightful. Mme. Ing, the patrician Borgia who rules Amboland, ends every discussion with the despot's stern logic: "Mme. Ing has won that argument," she purrs. U.S. Army Lieutenant Thibodeaux brags that the service "taught me how to fight and how to swear"-and then demonstrates just how poorly he learned at least...
Within this rigid constraint, the actors deliver mannered performances that are in several cases impeccable. David Cort, as the evil brother who engineers the Duchess' downfall, is unremittingly sinister. A Cardinal with a Borgia-like disregard for the moral teachings of the Church, he covets the wealth of his sister, a young widow, and cold-bloodedly arranges her excommunication and then her death. The Cardinal seduces and discards young women, betrays his brother, an ally in the conspiracy against the duchess, and is finally himself assassinated. The audience applauds when the Cardinal dies: Cort's portrayal allows for no sympathy...