Word: brilliant
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Using simple strokes and surefire cliches, always working from the outside out, now shaking their heads over what goes on and now smacking their lips, Playwrights Lawrence and Lee give their play a fair amount of story interest and shock value, while Actor Melvyn Douglas, with a brilliant impersonation, wins sympathy for their hero. But wherever the pull of the play is not purely factual it seems flagrantly fictional, particularly in a weak last act. It brings no insight to any of the questions it raises. It gets beneath none of the skin it flays. Nor does The Gang...
...Thomas Eakins, by Fairfield Porter, views the greatest of American masters through a reducing glass, calls him "outside of his time, because his intuition was hindsight," and yet is a consistently brilliant and fascinating offbeat analysis...
...shuddery look at Jean Cocteau, in which France's brilliant jack-of-arts sits tickling his lips with a stalk of lily of the valley, calculating his audience as coldly as a lizard calculates a fly-a portrait of the infant prodigy...
Mary Shelley came by her headstrong ways naturally. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a brilliant champion of women's rights and social revolution. Her father, William Godwin, was also one of the morning stars of reason and reform in the last years of the 18th century. Both advocated free love and reluctantly ignored their teaching to marry just five months before their daughter's birth. Yet from the day of her elopement, Mary Shelley suffered continual persecution not only from Shelley's family, but also from her own father, whose contempt for convention stopped abruptly...
...these were brilliant people, and occasionally they flash free of the author's clutch, as when "Monk" Lewis, master of the supernatural, jolts Shelley by ruling him out of a ghost-story session because Shelley is an atheist; or when Shelley's friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, hopes to seduce Mary while Shelley is away from home; or when Shelley gets a swimming lesson and plunges straight to the bottom, tempted by death and an answer to the Great Mystery. Despite such antics, Mary's father, husband and friends were schooled-and schooled her-to put intellect above...