Word: intellect
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...HOUSE OF INTELLECT (276 pp.)-Jacques Barzun-Harper...
...film divides in two. Judd and Artie are pictured in their furtive and bumbling friendship--Judd much the more attractive of the two, because of his curious morality of anti-morality ("I tell you evil is beautiful"). Judd becomes a kind of ignoble Hamlet, a boy of "superior intellect" ill-adapted to a slick world of Stutz-Bearcats, bootlegged gin, and flappers. Artie, who dares him on, commands less sympathy, but lends a certain amount of humor in his badgering of the police and elaborately contrived lying...
...boys resolve "to explore all the possibilities of human experience," to pluck the most exotic flowers of evil. Murder, Artie decides, is the only thing that will satisfy his compulsion "to do something really dangerous," and Judd loyally approves "the perfect crime" as "the true test of the superior intellect." So they kidnap a 14-year-old schoolboy named Paulie Kessler (fictional name for Bobby Franks), cosh-kill him in the back of a rented car, and dump the body in a culvert. Remorse? Artie seems incapable of human feeling. But thoughtful, sensitive Judd protests too much: "Murder...
...could vent his aristocratic and antisocratic bias only in a highly democratic community that permitted slander, libel, blasphemy, and indecency. Socrates (played with gusto and the proper amount of eccentricity by Upton Brady) appears as the pettifogging proprietor of a "think-shop," a sort of Rube Goldberg of the intellect with his head in the clouds of the title; and his students stoop over so their brains can look for profundities while their arses master star-gazing. The playwright achieved a special mixture of satire, criticism, obscenity, invective, wit, fantasy, and lyricism-all within a set of conventions as rigid...
...Doctor's Dilemma (Comet; M-G-M). The Fabian intellect and the Wagnerian soul were the lion and the unicorn of Bernard Shaw's personal mythology and creative life. In his later writings these opposites lie down together peacefully in the green pastures of Creative Evolution, but in The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) the two tendencies almost tear each other, and the play, apart. With all his romantic soul, Shaw longed to write a tragedy of the one and the many, of the creator-criminal murdered by the power of positive thinking and collective morality. With...