Word: ghoulishness
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...last twelve years, these ghoulish girls have won fame & fortune for their creator. A wiry, goateed man who still suffers from the "cab-horse knees" acquired in a World War II Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Cartoonist Ronald Searle has seen St. Trinian's become a part of the British public school folklore. His first two cartoon books have both gone through nine printings, and the school itself has appeared in skits in at least three musical revues. Today its bloody playing fields are as famous as Eton's, and its horrible little girls are quite as well...
Unburdened with any particular sense of the realistic or humane, Stalag 17 is a heartless jape that manages to be both lively and amusing. The sardonic talents of Producer-Director-Co-Scenarist Billy (Sunset Boulevard) Wilder are well tuned to these rather ghoulish goings on. Taking the action out of the barrack confines and into the barbed-wire compound at intervals, he has made a fluent film of the play. He has also got crisp characterizations from his cast. William Holden gives one of his quietly competent performances as a cynical G.I. Otto Preminger and Sig Ruman play comedy Nazis...
...morbidity, the picture is in no sense ghoulish. The children carry through their scheme seriously and tenderly, with a religious sense of dedication. Throughout, there is a subtle blending of a primitively religious motif with the workings of a subconscious death-wish on two ingenuous and sensitive minds, all to considerable dramatic effect. The two children chosen to play the leads--Brigitta Fossey and Georges Poujouly--are in every way equal to the demands of their roles...
...gusto, whether barking at charity solicitors, cringing before ghosts, demoniacally fleecing a business associate or lavishing favors on a startled Cratchit. Sim gets his best support from Kathleen Harrison, who expands the Dickens vignette of Scrooge's glum charwoman into a life-size comic portrait. Sample: the hilariously ghoulish scene that shows her cheerfully plying the rag & bones man with Scrooge's deathbed effects...
...humor has taken, from Peter Arno's old-maidish "whoops" girls of the '20s ("I'm gonna show me profile, dearie!" "Profile? Whoops! I ain't even takin' me coat off"), close kin to the charwomen of London's Punch, to the ghoulish gaiety of Charles Addams. Many a New Yorkerism (e.g., Cartoonist Carl Rose's "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it") has become a part of the language. The Album proves that, when told right, there is no such thing as a stale joke...