Word: explicit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...diversity of these characters did not reveal how general a problem Rattigan is stating, the lines he employs would, for he is quite explicit. Perhaps too explicit, for in the second play the invalid daughter is so weak as to be dramatically unexciting. She inspires only pity. As a result, the second play becomes almost a melodrama, with the forces of good and evil lined up like the liberals and McCarthy. But this explicitness does allow Rattigan free play to realize many aspects of the problem...
Since it focuses more on predudices than people, the film's handling of the relations between the characters is often clumsy. The people are so explicit with each other, especially at the start, that their conversation sounds more like exposition: "Why isn't he a regular fella, Bill?" "He certainly isn't a chip off the old block, Herb." Tom Lee's reputation as an "off-horse, not a regular guy" is established at once--crudely, with dialogue that is blatantly expository. His schoolmates don't speak like human beings, not even like unkind human beings...
...exciting, noisy spectacle. In the movie there is no doubt about Boris Godunov's guilt in the murder of Prince Dmitri: "Holy Russia groans under the guilty rule of an accursed regicide." Boris is the first to voice his own guilt. He makes his shame explicit in introspections which he carries on at the top of his lungs. Most of the other actors are no more pretentious about the "dramatic" roles...
...town's mind; anyway, it seldom is out of hers. Her hero (strangely enough a schoolteacher with a Greek name) courts the local widow with such niceties as "a stunning blow across the mouth with the back of his hand." And her love scenes are as explicit as love scenes can get without the use of diagrams and tape recorder. By sheer volume, the low animal moans produced "deep in the throat'' by Peyton Place's mating females must be audible clear to White River Junction...
Like her elders, Anne sometimes lets the animals get out of hand. Her title story is a well-polished but thin cliche: the blue dog, an outcast, dies happy in the cold because the snow lets him pass for white. But Anne is rarely that gushy, precious or explicit. Indeed, though she sees with a child's fresh eye, she has a special gift for the macabre. She raises an unlikely chill with the tale of a lady whose poodle comes to tea in a dinner jacket. She turns a trick of perspective to eerie effect by playing...