Word: brutish
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...Lagerkvist was brought up to devout Lutheranism. Grown, he turned agnostic. But his best novel, Barabbas, now published in the U.S., sounds as though Author Lagerkvist has never lost a deep preoccupation with, faith. Barabbas is a spare, subtle story about the struggle of a brutish man to understand the meaning of Christianity...
Previously he had spoken of the attributes of the gifted listener. Quoting Santayana, he warned; "though music were the most abstract of arts, it serves the dumbest of emotions." People respond to music from a "primal and almost brutish level," which acts as a reflection of their "physical life of gesture and movement," and of their "inner sub-conscious life...
...cinema version reunites the play's author, who worked on the script, its director, Elia Kazan, and most of the original principals, including Marlon (The Men) Brando as the tormented heroine's brutish brother-in-law, Kim Hunter as her well-balanced sister and Karl Maiden as her mama's-boy suitor. Even in casting Vivien Leigh in the leading role, thus brightening the marquee with a star more familiar to moviegoers than Broadway's Jessica Tandy, Director Kazan has chosen an actress who grew into the part in the London production of the play...
Kittens & Shepherds. Life at Dallgow, as described by some of its participants, now in the West, sounds like a Dostoevskian debauch. They tell of drunken bouts in Vasily's tightly guarded, 30-room villa; of his shouting rages, his wild rides in stolen cars, of cuffings, beatings and brutish practical jokes. Their stories, perhaps individually suspect, have when taken together a great deal of consistency. His first wife was dead. According to one story, she was killed in a plane crash which Vasily survived. At Dallgow he lived with Lelya Timoshenko, 21-year-old daughter of the Soviet marshal...
Hollywood's professional previewers last week thought they had spotted a new landmark in moviemaking. The picture: A Streetcar Named Desire, a faithful cinema version of the powerful, moody Broadway hit, with Vivien Leigh as the tarnished, sex-driven Southern schoolteacher, and Marlon Brando as her brutish brother-in-law. Said Playwright Tennessee Williams: "[It] has survived with whatever honesty and beauty it had in the beginning-and even more." Streetcar is due for release in September...