Word: spoofed
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...yarn about "that last great raid" contains echoes of many other films and film makers, most markedly Arthur Penn (The Left Handed Gun, Bonnie and Clyde) and Abraham Polonsky (Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here). Those are two decidedly congenial influences, however, and Kaufman has the ingenuity to spoof and comment on them and other sources even as he takes advantage of them...
Save for the Resnik spoof (Chacun a Bing's Gout, set to music from Die Fledermaus), the extracts on this disk are all unadulterated-and sung with the special fervor displayed by opera singers when their peers and rivals are in the wings. Soprano Leontyne Price brings a chaste passion to Dove Sono from The Marriage of Figaro. Soprano Montserrat Caballe and Tenor Placido Domingo, turning to Manon Lescaut, ask each other Tu, tu amore? Tu?, and answer in the way every Puccini fan dreams of hearing but rarely does. Awesome is the word for Birgit Nilsson...
Three years later in May of 1961 when he was a graduate student. Segal's Homeric spoof Sing. Muse! was performed in the Leverett House dining hall. Even the Crimson liked it. It was so well received that it attracted an off-Broadway producer. Opening that December, Sing. Muse! lasted only 39 performances. But Segal's career as a playwright was launched. "And I must emphasize, if began without my trying, you know. I wasn't down there making the theatrical scene. I was up here getting a Ph.D. And I wrote something for Leverett House 'cause they wanted...
Hound's action takes place in a theater on opening night. It is a spoof of an Agatha Christie thriller, and Stoppard handles it with prankish zest, though it lacks the urbane comic polish and spine-prickling tremors that Anthony Shaffer put into his Christie takeoff, Sleuth. The subplot concerns two drama critics who observe and comment on the play and eventually get actively drawn into it at no small risk. Here Stoppard is sly and wry, and one may guess that he views critics with bemused affection and subdued contempt...
Properly handled, such a gimmick might have launched a spoof of James' involuted style or a parody of Freudian criticism (scholars have wrangled for decades about whether the ghosts of Quint and Jessel are merely figments of the new governess's sexually starved imagination). Director-Producer Michael Winner, however, tries for a pretentious shocker in fancy dress. He serves up a pastiche of sexual sadism, witchcraft (two dolls are burned in chamber pots) and a pair of Quintessential messages: love and hate are synonymous; the dead just hang around wherever they are killed...