Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In a time of laid-back preaching, Davies is a successful anachronism: a consummate, self-conscious and often florid dramatist of the pulpit. A transplanted Welshman with volatile eyebrows and a powerful Thespian gift, he is not a large man, but he fills the brooding gothic gloom of the Near North Side church with his resounding voice, as the late Dylan Thomas might if he were reading Yeats, or Richard Burton would if playing Hamlet. Like the poet Thomas, Davies grew up in Swansea, Wales. He claims that Burton patterned his style on Welsh preachers...
...political career of for mer Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic. Now a sculpture of Bilandic and his socialite wife Heather, by John Setick, has created another blizzard, this one of controversy. Sefick's The Bilandics, which the sculptor describes as "a Chicago rendition of Grant Wood's American Gothic, "went on display in the city's Daley Center in mid-November. The work depicts the couple relaxing, with a taped voice coming from the former mayor's figure saying: "Put another log on the fire, Heather. I think it is beginning to snow again. My God, there...
...Emile Durkheim's theory that with the decline of Christian faith in the 19th century, suicide ceased to be a damnable act. The author seems to share Henry Adams' preference for the European 12th century and its security of belief as expressed in the glory of Gothic architecture. He does not assert that descriptions of the dark side of the Yankee mind, the haunted battlefields of the Civil War and the avarice of the Gilded Age as the disturbing context of Henry's and Clover's lives suggest a climate of deepening despair...
Gloucester is a good American town, the kind of town that hates anything too far out of its ken. Gloucester glared an American Gothic chagrin at 19th century religious mutants who sought to reform their church under the stern eye of local bigots and skeptics. These sectarians later became known as Unitarian Universalists and Christian Scientists, and the Gloucester people still chuckle at this historic yarn and shake their heads...
...result is not chills, but an uncontrollable desire to break into laughter, so lacking is the film in properly gothic suspense. Margot Kidder is chipper and pleasant as the puzzled wife resisting her worst suspicions about the demons in her dream house, but she cannot overcome the film's ineptitude and lethargy. The movie's creators should either have stuck to the facts, ma'am, or they should have invented something to scare the pants off us. As it is, they have managed merely to bore them...