Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CEREMONY IN LONE TREE, by Wright Morris (304 pp.; Atheneum; $4), is set in the barren Nebraska plains country, where the author stalks his favorite game -the "Sears Roebuck Gothic" Midwesterners with souls imprisoned like "buzzing flies" in "God's cocoon." Morris has been compared variously to Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, even Mickey Spillane, but in this, his 13th book, he sounds more like a kind of slick-paper Nathanael West, without that gifted writer's savage humor. His story is wired to the tangled nerve ends of the collection of oddballs and misfits who stumbled...
CINEMA Psycho. Perhaps overly gruesome and directed with an unusually heavy hand, this Hitchcock thriller nevertheless adds up to an expertly Gothic nightmare...
...about himself than that he is doomed-why bother? MURIEL MONTEKIO New York City Sir: The attack by Alfred Kazin is off the mark. All creative artists use exaggeration as a tool. This is as true of a Beethoven symphony as of the distorted figure of a Gothic saint as of the distorted pointing finger of Matthias Grunewald. The literary artist also by necessity must choose the exaggerated and often grisly side, especially the dramatist. Characters like incestuous Oedipus or child-murdering Medea are as "immoral" as the deplored modern ones, and so, for that matter, are Macbeth or Hamlet...
...nightmare that follows is expertly gothic, but the nausea never disappears. Little should be said of the plot-Hitchcock enjoins all viewers to be silent-except that Anthony Perkins, who plays an amateur taxidermist, is sickeningly involved, and that a blow is dealt to mother love from which that sentiment may not recover. Director Hitchcock bears down too heavily in this one, and the delicate illusion of reality necessary for a creak-and-shriek movie becomes, instead, a spectacle of stomach-churning horror...
Puritani takes place in Cromwell's England, where the Cavalier hero daringly dupes the Roundheads, but in the process is forced to abandon his betrothed, Elvira, who goes insane. Soprano Sutherland's triumph last week was that she made her audience overlook the opera's gothic absurdities and focus on its moments of real beauty, including Elvira's pre-wedding aria, "Son vergin vezzosa," and her splendid "Qui la voce sua soave," which introduces a mad scene every bit as effective as the more famous one in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Her voice...