Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Value Judgment. In Taipei, Formosa, Mrs. Kao Lai Chao-chi, who feeds 50 rats each night in her home charitably, explained: "Rats are no worse than many human beings...
...save the head and one leg, which they put aside for the next meal. It proved a mistake. A young boy found the head, ran horrified to tell his parents, and the police were called. Uganda, whites and blacks alike, was shocked: the ceremonial eating of a bit of human flesh is still not uncommon in Uganda, but wholesale cannibalism as such is unheard...
...Catholic ritual, many of the ceremonies will appear impressive. To those unfamiliar with religious life, much of the metamorphosis from girl of the world to cloistered nun will appear distasteful. Perhaps there is negative emphasis here. Convent life appears as a series of "cannots" and a continual warfare against human nature, but military cadets are subject to rigorous and sometimes incomprehensible discipline also...
Dame Edith Evans as the sympathetic superior general is superb, and she adds a warm human element to the austerity of the film. Peter Finch, the atheistic doctor in the Congo, rattles Sister Luke with his outbursts that question her vocation to be a nun and needle her about her religion and convent rule. Peter Finch and Dean Jagger as Sister Luke's surgeon-father are both excellent contrasting contributors to the nun's saga...
Self-interest, in La Rochefoucauld's view, was clearly the carrot that made men trot, as money was later singled out by Balzac, and sex by Freud. Yet, in obsessively concentrating on one human trait, as Author-Critic Louis Kronenberger points out in his new translation of the Maxims (Random House; $3.50), La Rochefoucauld narrowed his vision. Indeed, some of the maxims are strangely naive and platitudinous, suggesting once again that cynicism is sentimentality in reverse-and that, perhaps, the sheltered courtier could have learned from the crude common sense of the peasant. Yet at his best, as Kronenberger...