Word: jamesian
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Prettying Up Life. The sensitive Jamesian gentleman who views life as if it should be a pretty picture makes his first appearance. By ignoring evil, he usually ends up disillusioned and despairing...
...symbol of innate innocence. But in the movie, she seems to fall into Humbert's voracious clutches to avoid going to an orphanage after her mother is killed by a car. This destroys the underlying theme of the novel, which was a deliberate reversal of the classic Jamesian theme of American innocence v. European corruption...
AYME'S novel strikes one immediately as an altogether different sort of thesis. The Empty Canvas presented a figure too weary to be consistently ironic, like a Jamesian European sick of looking at the Catskills; The Conscience of Love throws a squat, unprepossessing narrator into a preposterous muddle of satire, false pathos, and genuine evil. One senses the irony stretching nearly to parody from the first paragraph...
Wendy Hiller brings Miss Tina quiveringly to life, at first, touchingly timid, in the end, touchingly rash. Stunningly miscast as the Jamesian relic of a more gracious age. Franchise Rosay, with her Gallic accent and facial gestures, seems rooted in some irascible French family film. Maurice Evans elegantly elocutes lines that might better be spoken, but the talk is a smokescreen for a character that isn't there...
...book all this horror, like a walking death, is veiled in a ghostly winding sheet of luminous Jamesian language. Nothing is clear; anything is possible; evil like a serpent glides unseen beneath each gliding sentence. In the film, necessarily, the spectral prose is replaced by spooky images and scary noises. Some of them are eerily effective: Sheffield Park, the gorgeously rotting old Georgian mansion in which the film was mostly made, is a demon's dream house, and Director Jack (Room at the Top} Clayton, sensitively seconded by Cameraman Freddie Frances, has filled every coign and corridor with...