Word: deafness
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Studio One: Psychiatric gimmicks have become such glib clichés on TV, as in most modern fiction, that writers are too often exposed with" their own craft ebbing. Last week The Deaf Heart performed the rare feat of tackling a psychiatric subject with freshness and a driving sense of drama that never marred its authenticity. Based on an actual case in Minneapolis, it was the story of a girl who went psychosomatically deaf in emotional flight from her role as the ears of a deaf father, mother and brother. It unfolded like a mystery story, beginning with the girl...
...Story begins when Esther Costello, an eight-year-old Irish girl, finds a cache of grenades in a ruined farmhouse and accidentally detonates them, killing her mother. The explosion does the girl no actual physical harm, but the shock leaves her deaf, dumb and blind. Five years later, an American woman (Joan Crawford) with plenty of money and nothing to do-she has recently walked out on her unfaithful husband (Rossano Brazzi) -takes the child (Heather Sears) on maternal impulse, and with the help of some therapists teaches her to hear, speak and see with her hands...
...speech became nasal and thick, like a cleft-palate victim's. Damage to the Eustachian tube and repeated infections left him almost deaf on the right side, where he had been accustomed to placing patients, so that his chair and analytic couch had to be transposed. Hardly intelligible in German, he could not surmount the added difficulties of a foreign tongue (though he had spoken English and French fluently), observed to famed Singer Yvette Guilbert: "Meine Prothese spricht nicht französisch [My prosthesis does not speak French...
Gaspard befriends a runaway boy who says he is searching for a lost homeland, but it soon turns out that the boy is really a girl. Plagued by an evil servant and a lunatic film producer, aided by an addled deaf boy and a family of wandering musicians, Gaspard and the girl search for the vanished "territory" of her childhood. Because this is a fairy tale, they find it, and it proves to be the wandering carnival world of Gaspard's parents, a world where the horizon "retreats unceasingly in time and space . . . and where we never find beauty...
...Universal-International) is the glittering trademark that Hollywood gave Lon Chaney in his day. He was also ballyhooed as a "mystery man," and the ballyhoo for once told the truth; when Actor Chaney died in 1930. the film colony mourned an enigma. Reticent and secretive, Chaney, son of two deaf-mutes, shrouded his personality, veiled his past as adroitly as he camouflaged his own features under masterful disguises (he was the Encyclopaedia Britannica's expert on movie makeup). Chaney enjoyed the respect of his own associates in the film industry, but he avoided both publicity and public places...