Word: witche
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...eloped with 17-year-old Loretta Young, eventually chalked up five wrecked marriages, hit the bottle ("They threw a net over me and hauled me to a sanitarium"), was reclaimed by his friend John Wayne, who got him parts in Wayne pictures (Wake of the Red Witch, Fort Apache); by his own hand (an overdose of barbiturates); in North Hollywood...
...expressed admiration for Bertolt Brecht, he is unwilling to follow him into the openly, almost abstractly, political drama. His play centers on three carefully humanized beings--a triangle, in fact. One would not expect adultery to be vitally involved with a matter so superficially asexual as the Salem witch trials, especially in the works of so high-minded an author. But the fact that his hero John Proctor has in times recently past "sweated like a stallion" after the slut who is now crying "Witch!" at his wife, adds to the play's intensity without detracting from its integrity...
...vivid as they might be, it is not entirely the fault of the actors. There is some slight sense that they were a second thought on Mr. Miller's part, as if he regarded them simply as a means to his end of writing about the implications of witch-hunting. He appears to be a Brechtean at heart, but not in manner, and so has neither produced a passionate parable a la Brecht, nor created particularly memorable autonomous characters in the naturalistic tradition...
...decorative, while the men made the main contribution with dramatic jumps, a kind of rhythmical chain-gang walk, and a Charleston-like dance step. Scenes ranged from flirtatious rambles in the market place to formally styled initiation ceremonies. One episode, simply enacting the death of a man and a witch doctor's earnest attempts to save him, conveyed the feeling of real tragedy, accompanied by chanting as insistent and haunting as Ravel's Bolero...
Even the drawing in Sleeping Beauty is crude: a compromise between sentimental, crayon-book childishness and the sort of cute, commercial cubism that tries to seem daring but is really just square. The hero and heroine are sugar sculpture, and the witch looks like a clumsy tracing from a Charles Addams cartoon. The plot often seems to owe less to the tradition of the fairy tale than to the formula of the monster movie. In the final reel it is not a mere old-fashioned witch the hero has to kill, but the very latest model of The Thing From...