Word: cosmically
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...McMahon's novel suffers from problems of technique and plotting. Timmy reads minds and recounts the distant intimate activities of others to an extent that damages credibility. Melodrama intervenes at too strategic moments: a convenient suicide wraps up one subplot, a scientist loses his wallet and laundry with cosmic consequences, an offstage Russian turns out to be a sex fetishist rather than...
HUMILIATION, guilt, psychic imprisonment, schizophrenia, cosmic alienation, cruelty, suicide, cancer of the soul: these are not unlikely concerns for a new film by Ingmar Bergman. Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, Persona, and Hour of the Wolf have all developed these themes, groped for them, probed them, pried them loose from their existential moorings, and held them up for all to see against the ambiguous Scandinavian sky in their full mystery and complexity. The Passion of Anna, however, attempts no exploration into these. It presents them, parades them, but asks no questions, suggests no solutions...
...editor ("Leper licker," Shrike calls him. "Still more swollen Mussolini of the soul"). Thinking to help, Miss Lonelyhearts arranges to meet one of his correspondents, a woman with a crippled husband. She rapes him. In the last scene, "his identification with God complete," Miss Lonelyhearts tries to envelop in cosmic pity the crippled husband-who seems to stand for long-suffering humanity. Terrified, the cripple shoots him dead...
Given a rather earthbound production by England's Nottingham Playhouse company, A Yard of Sun still rises to Fry's characteristic pitch, which might be described as cheeky-cosmic. The simplest of his characters can spin out rococo banter about the universe, God and the meaning of life. The setting is a courtyard in Siena, Italy, in 1946. The occasion is the reunion of four men back from the war-a refugee from a concentration camp, a doctor who was a partisan guerrilla, a would-be politician who joined the fascists, and a black marketeer who made...
...level, the entire venture is an unfortunate forced marriage of a pointless cosmic myth and a thoroughly conventional love story. Yet a need existed at that time which the film tries to fill, however feebly. In 1956, public curiosity and fear of flying sauccers was at a high point. Perhaps not coincidentally, the spirit of McCarthyism was in the recent past. And one of that period's most salient features was its fear of scientists who supposedly gave secrets to foreign nations. In short, the stereotype of the scientist was a political counterpart to the movies mad scientist image. Both...