Word: harshness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...elevation and intensity, The Roof falls short of the best neorealistic films, but in technical skill and in the subtlety with which it makes its points it ranks among the finest. Director De Sica humanizes the harsh material of the story with his easy gaiety and gentle humor, masterfully plays the Svengali to his pickup cast of raw amateurs-whom he inspires not to act but to live out their feelings with an artless art. Essentially, Neorealists De Sica and Zavattini have not changed their cinematic method, but they seem to have revised their social and moral philosophy. In their...
...psyche has fallen prey to its own drive for security. In protecting itself against the elements, against the harsh rule of nature, it has allowed itself to be ruled by its very safety devices...
...This harsh, shrill, constantly-hammering quality in Brecht's writing has led Alex Horn, who directed, to impose upon his cast a degree of rough broadness in their playing that they cannot convincingly sustain. Ray Reinhardt plays Puntila with considerable authority (he can actually look like a dying deer while somebody is telling him not to); Anne Meara as his daughter has a high-spirited charm that shines out of everything she does. But even they have strained and labored moments, and certain minor cast members have no moments of any other kind. John Lasell plays the hired man with...
Long Scoffers. Nehru's lashing out at the Communists, after years of a kind of neutralism that often had harsh words for the West but muted its displeasure with the Communists (and even publicly underwrote Peking's "peace-loving" intentions), won him cheers in the Assembly. Congress Party President Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, was tougher. Speaking in Kerala, the only Red-ruled state in India, she flatly declared that "Communism and democracy are incompatible-they are opposite." For the first time, there is widespread discussion of the threat posed to India by the armed might...
During the early 1920s, while the Reds and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang were in uneasy alliance against the anarchic Chinese warlords, Liu worked as a labor organizer, surfaced from time to time in Canton, Shanghai, Manchuria. Repeatedly jailed, he was a top underground leader in the harsh 1927 fighting in Shanghai between the Communist labor unions and Chiang Kaishek, described in André Malraux's novel Man's Fate. Liu's first wife reportedly tried to commit suicide at the party's underground headquarters, and he hired a ricksha to take...