Word: hysteria
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Philip Wylie is getting old, and all the worst aspects of his writing are becoming accentuated as he ages. His latest novel, Triumph, treats the Third World War with hysteria and platitudes; his improbable plot is no more than an unwieldy vehicle to parade Wylie's ideas on desegregation, prejudice, sex, miscegenation, brotherly love and a swarm of other fascinating topics. Unfortunately for the novel, Wylie's ideas of these and all other matters are insipid. His book is the dullest piece of writing you can find anywhere on the best-seller list...
...paperwork drudgery, enervating and mind-killing. Not all theses fit this description, but most do, so why Puritanically castigate a student who is wise enough to see that CLGS will give his mind more freedom and stimulation? Why not give him his freedom, instead of reacting with the pedantic hysteria that several departments have countered with by threatening to give "E" for an incomplete thesis...
...fire-breathing old father Ephraim with monomaniacal force. As the woman, Colleen Dewhurst achieves a masterly transitional shading between feline will and wiles and the whole-souled vulnerability of love. Son Eben is played by Rip Torn, who unfortunately adopts a tone of flat understatement and clenched-nerves hysteria that tends to throw the play's passions off pitch...
Fighting Injustis. In conservative Portland, Reed was suspect from the day President Foster descended on it with his pacifism, social conscience and simplified spelling (dout, injustis). His students were soon questioning everything from the effect of vaudeville on children to anti-German hysteria in World War I. Reed is still that way. Portland cops once jailed a Reed student for reading Shelley by moonlight on campus; next night 20 Reed students did the same on a Portland street corner. Hardly a strike goes by in Portland without some Reed student getting involved and even arrested...
Hysterics, when Freud (Montgomery Clift) begins to study them, are scorned by neurologists as silly women who act up to get attention, suffer at worst from a "wandering womb." Freud doubts the diagnosis, suggests that hysteria proves the existence of unconscious thoughts. Most of his colleagues laugh in his face, but Dr. Josef Breuer (Larry Parks) describes a hysteric named Cecily (Susannah York) who relieved a symptom simply by talking about what caused it. Freud takes over the case. And so begins a vastly exciting drama of detection, in which the audience simultaneously sees a lurid mystery unfold...