Word: luridness
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Lust for Life and The Young and the Passionate compete for the week's lurid titles. One is about Van Gogh and the other is about Italians, respectively at the Kenmore and the Brattle...
...blunt, except where the self-dramatizing old actor and the word-conscious young writer empurple it -has in the theater far more trenchancy than the half-poetized prose so frequent in O'Neill. Even the lengthiness weights and certifies a story that, if told concisely, could merely seem lurid...
Long Day's Journey does not seem lurid. If only through writing about the family nightmare could O'Neill expunge it from his mind, then by waiting half a lifetime before he wrote, he achieved a strange but sure perspective. The play suggests a kind of emotional total recall rather than subjective involvement; in the most personal of his plays O'Neill seems, as a writer, least selfconscious. He has succeeded, not-as is usual in creative autobiography-through assuming some kind of mask, but through stripping himself bare. Memory has had for O'Neill...
...wonder. Every character in Peyton Place, from the gallused bench-sitters on Elm Street to the assured local mill owner, has a lurid history that John O'Hara's characters might envy. Novelist Metalious suggests that sex is never long out of the town's mind; anyway, it seldom is out of hers. Her hero (strangely enough a schoolteacher with a Greek name) courts the local widow with such niceties as "a stunning blow across the mouth with the back of his hand." And her love scenes are as explicit as love scenes can get without...
...shows four stab wounds and unmistakable signs of torture. Chief Inspector Gently, Central Office, C.I.D., a Scotland Yard detective who unfortunately pops peppermints into his mouth during tense moments, gives the tale a tone of well-mannered British calm in spite of the neon-lighted boardwalk setting and a lurid cast of characters, which includes a prostitute, a couple of juvenile delinquents, a village idiot and a gang of international spies...