Word: martyrdoms
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...fabric of history, which T. S. Eliot stretched upon a strangely spiritual frame, is restored to a more human and traditional shape by Richard Corum's brilliant direction of Murder in the Cathedral. Corum's work gains its vigor by rejecting Eliot's theological interpretation of Becket's martyrdom. From a poetically beautiful but theatrically impossible play, he has created an intellectually indecisive drama of enormous power...
Becket's acceptance of martyrdom is the purest spiritual achievement in Eliot's play. He transcends even the temptation of becoming a martyr so that he may be worshipped. Corum has destroyed Eliot's clear position. He has decided to return the four tempters to stage as the knights who murder the archbishop, and the tempter who offered Becket immortality through martyrdom asks, after the death, whether Becket did not will himself to be killed. For Eliot this was a rhetorical question, answered in the cool detachment of Becket's final lines, and by the contrast between Becket...
Before taking up with a cat, Greer advises the prospective owner to find a pet whose personality matches his own. Siamese, for example, are friendly and fun-loving, even though they sometimes go around muttering to themselves. The Manx is timid, dependent, and doleful to the point of martyrdom-ideal for the man who wants to be a god to his cat. Persians (and all pedigreed long hairs are so named) have minds of their own, often forget early hygiene training. Their attitude is "Why bother?" The Burmese are wise, persuasive, and can freeze a fool owner in his tracks...
Olivier was masterful as the priest marked for martyrdom-bewildered at the force within him that keeps him from fleeing, shocked when his child spits in his face, agonized while watching "all the hope of the world draining away" in an emptied bottle of wine, despairing as he cries out for a Judas to betray him, collapsing in lip-quivering terror in the face of death. Producer Susskind surrounded Olivier with a supporting cast almost incredible in its depth. George C. Scott was superb as the police lieutenant who destroys his victim with cold intelligence and sympathetic understanding rather than...
...chosen to assume entire responsibility for the muzzling. Rather than subscribing to the extraordinary notion that the discipline of General Edwin Walker is the work of radical subversives within the Department, he has flatly stated it to be his own. He has, in short, refused to allow the martyrdom of General Walker...