Word: headsman
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Lord High Everything Else, was marvelous as the proud but corrupt political hack. But the undisputed star of the show was Josh Rubins, as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner. Following the opulent train of reverent courtiers, he wore a ludicrous robe decorated with axe-heads and carried a headsman's axe several inches taller than he is. It was enough to bring down the house. His version of "As someday it may happen that a victim must be found" included some updated lines ( that singular anomaly, the strict constructionist ), and visual effects-pulling out a picture of Nixon while...
...future." It blasts off with a scene so brilliant that the whole picture shivers from the thrust. In a masque, a musically flatulent clown capers on a stage, mocking the audience with scatological jokes and gestures. A grinning idiot is carried onstage and led to a chopping block. A headsman mimes a blow with his weapon -then chops the victim's hand off to a chorus of cackles, while freshets of blood stain the scene. It is a savage fragment of the cinema of cruelty, a death-in-life image, like T.S. Eliot's perception of "the skull...
...like Katherine, she is natally undone. England needs a future king. The old Queen produced stillborn princes. The new one gives birth to a live female and a dead male. Enraged, Henry VIII rigs charges of adultery against Anne and dooms her to the Tower of London and the headsman...