Word: cloddish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dark Corridors. The opera's hero, Franz Wozzeck (Baritone Hermann Uhde), is a cloddish German soldier who recoils with protoplasmic twitches and tremors from the shock currents of life. Haunted by nameless terrors, persecuted by everybody around him, he stumbles down the dark corridors of his world like a crippled blind man, lacking even the tragic dignity that a suggestion of malevolent fate might give his life. He is ridiculed by his captain (Tenor Paul Franke), who seems to stand for all the bluster of petty militarism. He is used as a guinea pig by a doctor (Bass Karl...
...Trevelyans, the Webbs, and the sessions of the Bloomsbury Group. There are also the various views of Harvard as it has changed over the half-century during which Russell has visited it. When Russell taught symbolic logic here in 1914, for instance he seemed to find his students a cloddish lot. (There were, as Russell wrote at the time, two exceptions however: one was a young Greek named Raphael Demos, the other a fellow called T.S. Eliot...
...blood, dialect comedy, crude mechanical cartoon analogies of circulatory functions ("groceries and garbage"), and a screenful of Disney-like animals spouting slang. In a coy story-within-a-story device, a researcher (Dr. Frank Baxter) and a fiction writer (Richard Carlson) tried to make their material palatable to the cloddish cartoon animals. The total effect of Hemo was unhappily that of a choice filet mignon smothered with gobs of marshmallow sauce...
Perhaps the most striking aspect of The Vagabond is the intentional shabbiness of its symbols: for love, Colette uses the dull-witted, cloddish Maxime; and for work and art, the rushing, irregular life of a cafe dancer. Renee faces no final decision, because in Colette's world there is none. Her characters drift on the sea of their instincts, and each decisive action shifts only a little the burden of their unfulfilled lives. In the end, Renee writes to Maxime: "Seek far from me that youth, that fresh, unspoilt beauty, that faith in the future and yourself, in a word...
Paul Douglas plays the cloddish but honest fisherman husband with a good deal of earnestness, while Barbara Stanwyck gives one of her regulation good performances of a bad girl. As the cynical lover, Robert Ryan plays a motion-picture projectionist who speaks some grade-B movie dialogue, e.g., to Barbara: "Your husband's the salt of the earth, but he's not the right seasoning for you." Also on hand, in a minor role: shapely Marilyn Monroe. as a fish-cannery employee who bounces around in a succession of slacks, bathing suits and sweaters...