Word: dickensians
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...first anvil hint is dropped in the opening scene: in a dormitory of Miss Hannigan's Dickensian orphanage, the eldest of six orphans jumps from bed to bed-and one galumphing foot lands splat! on the forehead of a younger girl. It's no wonder that when Annie (Aileen Quinn) gets the chance to live with Daddy Warbucks (Albert Finney), she promptly forgets her orphan camaraderie. But then the entire movie is a series of plot strands twisted, then discarded...
...fluttering tailspin-reaching bottom at a Dickensian snake pit where she was gang-raped by drunken G.I.s and subjected to every form of torture the psychiatric Establishment could devise, from shock treatment to massive doses of mind-bending drugs and, quite possibly, a transorbital lobotomy-is the stuff nightmares and film biographies are made of. Now a company of film makers is attempting just that: Frances, a $10 million movie starring Jessica Lange as the doomed actress and Kim Stanley as her wildly eccentric mother Lillian...
Baby Love inhabits a world few white folks ever see, a Dickensian hell of cheap thrills, senseless deaths and almost unrelieved hopelessness. He lives in Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant section, one of the oldest black settlements in the U.S. Unlike the burned and ravaged South Bronx, ten miles to the north, Bedford Stuyvesant does not resemble a war zone; most of its owner-occupied row houses, brownstones and churches are more or less intact. But high unemployment and a 60% dropout rate among black high school students make it a very dangerous place. One Bed-Stuy precinct, the 77th...
...plot that Snow the ex-physicist unfolds in this posthumously published work of nonfiction is better than any that Snow the novelist invented in his romans à clef like The Search and The New Men. There is something marvelously Dickensian, for instance, about Ernest Rutherford, whose booming voice upset such sensitive instruments as Niels Bohr, the Henry James of atomic physics, who whispered his way through labyrinths of elegant theory to explain what Rutherford demonstrated. Then, with Einstein ("the best company of all the great physicists") hovering above the scene, the rest of Snow's pantheon is Introduced...
...rises to the rafters and rings the balcony, the R.S.C. tells this 800-page story of a young innocent in the first years of Victoria's reign. The company's 39 actors essay upwards of 250 roles, from weak-willed aristocrat to poor heroic cripple. The play dives into Dickensian bathos, preposterous coincidences, abrupt reversals of fortune, the collision of improbable goodness with impossible evil?and emerges triumphant, soaring with spirit. In the process it displays the grandest theatrical techniques, affirms the Tightness of love and friendship, revives pleasures and poignancies that have all but vanished from modern narrative...