Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...days before the Really Big Rich, and few Texans could resist that sort of an appeal. Ma won. A rawboned woman with an American Gothic jaw, she looked as hard as a banker's heart. Actually, she was a college-educated, devoutly religious, well-bred woman who was about as political as peach cobbler. She was, above all, a dutiful wife. Her first act as Governor was to sign an "amnesty" restoring Farmer Jim's right to hold public office. (It was rescinded by her successor.) Though both Fergusons were teetotalers, they opposed Prohibition. In her first term...
...trap door in the cellar lies a mysteriously deformed skeleton. "This Gothick tale," says Author Russell Kirk, is "in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto." He is wrong. Historian Kirk (The Conservative Mind) has expertly stuffed his book with all the claptrappings of the Gothic romance, but what he has actually achieved is a political morality tale. For all the apparent ectoplasm floating about it, the Old House of Fear is haunted not by ghosts but by the shadow of the welfare state...
...Madonnas. Twice daily after she arrived in Paris, Alexandre went to Jackie's apartments on the Quai d'Orsay, brushing and shaping her hair in a huge silvery, mother-of-pearl bathroom. For a formal reception at the Elysee Palace, Alexandre, declaring himself inspired by pictures of Gothic Madonnas, thickened Jackie's bangs and "dressed her cheeks" with two sweeping waves. Anticipating complaints that the style hid too much of Jackie's face, Alexandre said: "A beautiful face needs foliage around it." For a ball next night at Versailles, Alexandre moved on from the Madonnas...
Despite the tinhorn sound of the story, the movie manages to capture some of the sad, tawdry flavor of tent-show revivalism. There are authentic twangs to the score, a sweaty, sensuous realism in the swaying backwoods crowd, and vivid glimpses of gnarled God-fearing faces in Grant Wood gothic. The actors are so good they sometimes manage to make what they say seem important...
...Indifference. Joan Williams, 32, now lives in Connecticut, but she remembers her small-town Southern youth with remarkable precision. The Morning and the Evening is a carefully controlled yarn, which has as its hero the village idiot of a small Mississippi town. What seems at first like another Southern Gothic construction, with heartstrings, quickly becomes something more important. No near-helpless, mute man of 40 can arouse an emotion much stronger than pity, but the reactions of neighbors to his helplessness and his own vulnerability to cruelty can tell a great deal about man's eternal debt...