Word: dickensian
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Taxes were up. The rent was coming due. Everyone needed a job and was worried about going bust. In this Dickensian situation, the Royal Shakespeare Company, by a kind of inevitable inspiration, turned to Dickens...
This is Flannery O'Connor country, where souls are gnarled and agony seems the only common measure of humanity. Even the corpulent landlord, Mr. Wick, who first comes into focus as a Dickensian villain, on closer inspection becomes merely a grownup, terrified boy forever humiliated by a sadistic father...
Piggy has undergone drastic transformations. The victim of society's malevolence is now a deformed orphan, charred in the London blitz, and tortured in true Dickensian from by a perverted teacher in the Foundlings School who enjoy's fondling. The dust jacket labels it a brilliant exploration of weirdness...
...sure, many Korean laborers get subsistence wages for long hours and Dickensian working conditions. Still, there is ample evidence that the quality of life is gradually improving as South Korea's hard-earned wealth trickles down. Life in the cities and the countryside has a long way to go to match that in Japan or the West, but it is far superior to what North Korea has to offer. For many South Koreans, who remember the grinding poverty they endured as a war-destroyed nation just a quarter-century ago, the rewards of modernization still outweigh its abuses...
...that her child-woman screen character was anything but sticky sweet. In Stella Marts, for instance, she played a double role: a crippled heiress and a love-obsessed slavey who commits murder so that the heiress and her lover (whom the slavey also loves) can find happiness. In the Dickensian Sparrows, she played a clever and persistent teen-ager who frees the inmates of an orphanage from sadistic bondage. It was a strong role for a forceful woman. Even in pictures like Pollyanna or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pickford showed wit, endearing mischievousness and sheer spunk...