Word: likes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fighting back, Fonda hires assassins, one of whom kills the other. He also fends off a blackmailer who wants enough money to live for three days like an American tourist. Thus the film alternates between unsuccessful farce and success-formula soap opera, but it never quite lives up to its pressagentry as "twists of tender pathos sublimated by laughter before the pathos can descend to bathos." The Man Who Understood Women is bathos cubed...
Climate of Horror. Unmarried at 32, Eleanor Vance has spent the past eleven years of her life caring for a sick mother whom she hated. Now Mama has died, Eleanor is living with a dull married sister, and her experience of life is a dreary vacuum. It is almost like liberation when Dr. Montague takes her on as one of three assistants to check psychic phenomena at a haunted house in a grubby small town. Author Jackson, a self-confessed dabbler in magic, sets her scene with professional care. The big old house is a crazily built warren...
Refuge from Life. Within a week Eleanor is thinking of the haunted house as a refuge from her hated life. She gradually gives up her fears, her fight for sanity, puts out welcoming arms to the madness that embraces her. She dances through the house like a dervish at night, comes close to what seems happy suicide. By this time Dr. Montague and the others insist on sending her home, and Eleanor's life ends in one of those terrible scenes of mental horror that Author Jackson knows so well how to contrive. The difficulty is that the story...
While the belly laughs are few, the chuckles are frequent in The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, and as its redoubtable hero might put it, "by Keplen. high-tone crititzizink is a vaste time. Tsplit infinitifs, I got; wrong tanses, like-vise; dobble nagetifs, also. Hau Kay? Enjoy...
...chiefly a record of night errantry, of seductions conducted on a scale that will amaze today's grey-flannel philanderer. But the language is witty and infinitely less crude than that of almost any contemporary bestseller. And Casanova's powers of observation make his autobiography read like a fascinating picaresque novel. As Critic Edmund Wilson put it: "Even when he has slipped to the bottom, he keeps his faculties clear...