Word: guignol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Curse of the Living Corpse, despite its air of amateur Grand Guignol, unreels with grisly assurance. The plot involves "a homicidal maniac-bent on revenge by the most horrible means possible." Though locked in the family vault, a late and unlamented patriarch seemingly wants to settle his estate heir by heir. One morning the hired girl comes up on the dumb-waiter head first. Head only, in fact. Subsequent victims are cruelly disfigured, dragged behind a horse, stabbed, burned alive, or drowned in the bath. In this orgy of supermarket sadism, the blood looks like Brand X catchup, but there...
Strait-Jacket. Joan Crawford cuts loose in a sanguinary shudder-show that suffers from a split personality. It was written by Robert Bloch (Psycho), but screams for the sure hand of Hitchcock; it aspires to the Grand Guignol of Baby Jane, but falls short of being droll. Yet despite foolish dialogue, blunt direction, and a fustian plot, there are moments of breath-stopping terror as the heads roll, at times almost literally...
...husband, expounds a boozy philosophy, talks baby talk, goes off to the kitchen to seduce a casual visitor, and turns in a performance that stains the memory but stays there. The play is Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a psychological Grand Guignol set in the academic world, and last week, for her portrayal of Martha, a professor's rough-edged wife, Uta Hagen won the Antoinette Perry Award for the year's best performance by an actress...
...Boris their operatic masterwork-most of them come from Moscow. Both Hines and London have sung the role there, and both now claim to be about to make a recording of the opera with the Bolshoi company. Khrushchev himself applauded London, but last week, when Hines sang his Grand Guignol Boris at the Met, Soviet U.N. Ambassador Nikolai Fedorenko came backstage and said, "You are Boris...
Gulliver Unravels. At this point it may be suspected that Burgess is merely putting on a Grand Guignol and that he shares Alex's taste for the existentialist's "gratuitous act" or pointless crime. He is not. Alex's later story is "like tragic" and expounds a bitter moral theorem. He is jailed and selected by the state authorities for Reclamation Treatment. Under drugs and with his eyelids clipped open, he is forced to watch an endless succession of films showing Japanese and Nazi tortures while Beethoven supplies the sound track. Then, conditioned like Pavlov...