Word: leos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hall set at the peak of a sculptured lawn, with sunlight tinging the entire scene, flecking the grass with gold and making shadows deepen. There are two children holding tight to their caps as they're whirled to the manor door. The smaller, the pained and worried one, is Leo Coston, the narrator. Somehow, the hall is never as big as Leo's first glance suggests...
...important tone and point-of-view of this late-Victorian period piece is thus economically set. Losey and Pinter are concerned with the social pressures afflicting Leo, and how his use of emotive and imaginative outlets for escape ultimately cripple...
...Leo's friend, Marcus Maudsley, uses him as a plaything--one with macabre attractions, to be sure. Leo, the orphaned son of a shabby-genteel pacifist and book-collector, is notorious at his school only because of his black magic. There is no real affection present in the relationship; a thick oil of politeness surrounds the entire Maudsley family. The Maudsleys test each other aesthetically rather than touch and exchange emotions or ideas...
...clear that Leo has come not for reasons of friendship, but out of a searching adolescent curiosity, heightened by upwardly-mobile ambition. And though the hall and lawns continuously awe him, it is the rulers, the adults, the gentlemen and ladies who ignore him, who fascinate him. Even the hall can be a setting for childish games, and its acquiescent housekeepers offer some degree of home comfort. But the elder Maudsleys are to Leo mythical figures, inhabitants of yet-another distant country. Beneath the way of life they share with him, the feel incomprehensible things; Leo is determined to understand...
Marion, Marcus's older sister, is the inevitable object of Leo's yearnings. At once the warmest of the Maudsleys, she also hides more mysterious secrets. While dawdling with a perfect match, the Viscount Hugh Trimmingham, she is making love to a tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. After a series of plot coincidences which seem audacious in a contemporary movie-going context, but are somewhat justified by the boy's mystic qualities, Leo becomes Mercury, the messenger of the gods, the go-between delivering letters of rendezvous from Burgess to Marion...