Word: gothic
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With a perversity hardly matched since Shakespeare put an ass's head on Bottom, Miss Murdoch has made a career out of bewitching into beastliness the discreetly charming British bourgeoisie. In her neo-Gothic tales, subtle spells fill the air until respectable Londoners seem to sprout horns under their bowlers, rolled umbrellas (one would swear) resemble snakes, and good gray Anglican church towers turn primitive, not to say phallic...
...melodrama-subtitle it The Snob's Revenge-Read's romance twirls its waxed mustaches too wickedly. (In training for his major villainies, the parson's son also steals, pimps, and drowns a newborn baby.) Read's true gothic gift is for translating melodrama into a morality play: plotting on tabloid pulp paper while commenting on the finest India leaf. It is as a study of repentance that Read's story demands to be taken seriously...
Tatum's childhood has been more gothic than glamorous. Her mother, Actress Joanna Moore, and O'Neal are divorced, and waged bitter custody fights over Tatum and her brother Griffin, 8. For several years the children lived a hippie existence with their mother on a California ranch. O'Neal charged that his former wife was using drugs and not properly supervising the children. The parents came to an agreement in 1971, and Ryan took Tatum while the mother kept Griffin. When Director Peter Bogdanovich suggested that O'Neal and Tatum costar, O'Neal leaped...
...idea about what's up there and what's not, but some awfully peculiar things have happened to keep King of Glory going." Somewhere along the line, the idea began to take on a dynamism of its own. "I call it the Gothic psyche," says Dodson. "There you had thousands of people in the Dark Ages who were part of a spiritual movement to build cathedrals. Here we have a spiritual movement among hundreds of people to have a pageant...
...truck with five bad tires (counting the spare), on a road monopolized by a brindled milch cow named Trixie. Here calculated excess works in the cause of comic relief, suggesting that the future of the Southern novel may belong to the tall tale rather than further variations on the gothic. Melvin Maddocks