Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wilbur J. Bender, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aids in Harvard, explained that the selectivity of colleges in the United States has been over-publicized and has caused hysteria where there was no need for it. He said that there are only 50-75 of the 2000 U.S. colleges that are not truly selective...
...adequate. Frederick Blais as the father, and head of the Stanhope family, suffered most from this failing and played his part on too high a level from the beginning. This left him no room for growth of emotional intensity in the final scene, where he finally resorted to uncontrolled hysteria. Richard Knowles as the reporter managed by his tone and facial expressions to disguise the fact that the reporter is not a slimy busybody but a spiritual successor to Alison. Probably the best performance of the evening was given by Karen Johnson in the role of the wayward daughter...
These two examples suggest that there was probably as much hysteria among McCarthy's foes as among his followers. In a remarkably well-balanced and even-tempered book. Author Rovere (for the past eleven years Washington correspondent for The New Yorker) notes that "McCarthyism was a bipartisan doctrine." He blames not only some Republicans for tolerating Joe so long but some Democrats (notably Senators Paul Douglas and John Kennedy) for not speaking out against him. Rovere might have added that those who did speak out against McCarthy sometimes helped him by exaggerating his importance. To Rovere himself. McCarthy remains...
...that of a friend with whom one was to have had tea. To make things worse, a plague of mysterious telephone calls begins. A man's voice delivers a chilling message: "Remember you must die." Police investigate but uncover nothing; suggestions are made of mass hysteria. The plague spreads; old scoffers answer their phones, hear the message, but shut it out when they can, determined to caper out their danse macabre till they drop. At their best, which of course is their worst, they behave like characters somehow kept alive after the last page of a Waugh novel...
...There is only one trend in the American theatre, and that trend is Eli Kazan.... I certainly don't know anyone whom actors venerate so much. But he seems to prefer plays concerned with extremes of pain, extremes of guilt, extremes of hysteria. Now there are a lot of awfully good plays on that subject"; here he instances Oedipus Rex. But "Oedipus expiates for the sake of his entirectiy," while the heroes of J.B. and Sweet Bird of Youth (the two plays most recently directed by Kazan) are concerned in their expiation only with themselves. "Somehow the connection between strong...