Word: gothic
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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...
Feather on a Head. What is architecture? It was, said Le Corbusier in his book, something that went far beyond style. "The styles of Louis XIV, XV, XVI, or Gothic, are to architecture what a feather is on a woman's head." Essentially, architecture was the "masterly, correct, and magnificent placing of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light. Cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage...
...magician: out of old newspaper pages about an obscure crime, he has proliferated a great flowering of sin and scenery, myth and mysticism. He resembles Simenon in his ability to evoke swiftly a street, a room, a city. In the final chapters, there is an unfortunate settling down of Gothic and miasmal mist, but even here, Gabrielle Bompard is wildly and insistently alive, whether jabbing a coachman with her imperious parasol or grumbling crossly at a tired lover: "Is it my fault if men overestimate their capacities?" Many readers, like Jacquemar himself, may be horror-stricken to find that they...
...WATCHMAN, by Davis Grubb (275 pp.; Scribner; $3.95), is the latest of the author's marrow-chilling tales of good and evil, written in a style compounded of Hans Christian Andersen imaginativeness and American Gothic hyperbole. His Night of the Hunter (1954), a surefooted, poetic horror story of two children and a malevolent pursuer, was told with controlled passion. Now in The Watchman, Grubb has pulled out all the stops, piled terror on madness, disaster on helplessness. The book is a mixture of poetic rage against cruelty in man, a song in praise of physical love...