Word: dawson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fine scenes and good performances. Though played as contemporary melodrama, it somehow manages to reflect the gaslight magic of turn-of-the-century London. Murder is the plot, but everyone is extremely gentlemanly about the crime, from the Holmesian police inspector (John Williams) down to the caddish assassin (Anthony Dawson). The crime is conceived by quick-witted Ray Milland, who, losing his wife's love, decides to murder her for her money rather than wait for her to leave him. A solicitous sort who doesn't want to hurt anyone unnecessarily, Milland arranges to spend the night...
...Although Dawson, along with Dante and Langland, sometimes stops for a quiet tear over medieval man's passing, he is far more interested in communicating the worth of medieval man-his feeling for spirituality, his sense of social commu nity, his universal values-to his descend ants in modern Europe. For one thing, the medieval "world of Christian culture" is more akin to the present than the humanist traditions that have governed Europe since the Renaissance...
...Says Dawson: "The [medieval world] was always at grips with the problem of barbarism. It had to face the external threat of alien and hostile cultures, while at the same time it was in conflict with barbaric elements within its own social environment which it had to control and transform. And in this work it could not rely on the existence of common standards of civilization or common moral values. It had to create its own moral order before it could achieve an ordered form of civilized existence...
...NATO statesmen, Historian Dawson offers the comfort of a historical parallel: for the everyday citizen in the world of 1954, a reminder that a long-created moral order is already in existence...
...Gibbon, writing in the Decline and Fall, scornfully dismissed them as "the triumph of barbarism and religion." - Dawson rates Langland's contemporary, Chaucer, as more of a courtly storyteller who "took the world as he found it," very like his Italian opposite number. Boccaccio. Not so Langland, who wrote bitterly of his times...