Word: devilment
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Riverboat Devil. What Melville aims at in these episodes is a scathing, nihilistic critique of every reigning belief of 19th century America: shallow assumptions about perpetual progress, Christian hypocrisy and pretensions, easy optimism about man, nature and the universe, Emersonian uplift and self-seeking self-reliance, and the hard-driving spirit of commerce in all things. But Melville will not stop until he can debunk the goodness and glory of God. In a final episode, an old man sits reading the Bible by the light of a solitary lamp. A young sharper (not the confidence-man) exposes...
...Devil is getting his due in French books, plays and movies these days, and Author Gabriel Venaissin notes the trend in the current issue of Combat: "An odor of sulphur hovers over Paris . . . The Devil in 1955 uses Chanel perfume, however. He is a distinguished man of the world . . . Lucifer burns no one today. But it's strange to see him come back so abundant, so eloquent, so cut up, as it were, into hundreds of little devils all trying to outrival each other...
...gets a name for sainthood thrust upon him. His noticeable talents for talking to birds, healing children and making plums grow on cherry trees have forced the bishop to banish him to a remote country parish. There, in the form of a worldly baron, appears an emissary of the Devil, panting after such a trophy as the soul of a saint. Under the baron's prodding, the canon begins to think he really is a saint, starts meddling in lives and dabbling in miracles, and soon commits some serious clerical errors. Only in the nick of time...
...Irish tongue, offers mere bits of verbal Irish lace. Some fairly standard jokes about the Irish and the clergy take on almost the character of leitmotivs. Even most of the characters fail to come off-including Paul Lukas as the baron. There the play does not give the Devil his due: the one thing an emissary of his would most certainly not be is a crashing bore...
...swallows dart freely above him. King Norodom will often play the saxophone, or conduct his own personal orchestra. He also writes movie scripts and produces them, occasionally playing the lead himself. Once he was great as a mad scientist, turning human victims into zombies at the prick of his devil's needle. "If I ever lose this king job," he remarked, "then maybe I can go to Hollywood. They like Oriental characters over there, don't they? Maybe I could be a Cambodian Charlie Chan...