Word: luridness
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...Lurid Moment. This omnibus is welcome if only for the reissue of Company K, which belongs in trench literature with Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and John Dos Passes' Three Soldiers. When it was published (1933), one critic called it a sort of Spoon River Anthology of the war. The form was the same, in the sense that each character spoke with his own voice to compose a harsh recitative for a community. But March's community was made up of the doomed dogfaces of Soissons...
...tense. If the play has its shortcomings, the chief reason is the old have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too one. Time Limit! tries to be exciting and significant by turns, rather than the one by means of the other. A serious theme must often defer to a lurid plot: instead of an intensity that makes truth itself thrilling, there is an ingenuity that makes not just thrills but even truths theatrical. But in its alternating-current way, Time Limit! has considerable voltage...
...Value, by Robert Ruark, was probably the most tastelessly written book of the year (unless it was Norman Mailer's The Deer Park). Around a hackneyed story, and leaning heavily on the writings of others about the Mau Mau troubles in Kenya, Columnist Ruark turned a determinedly lurid story into a top bestseller...
...Deer Park, he has created another contrived locale--Desert D'Or, two hundred miles from Hollywood. This is a resort for the stars, directors, and other notables of the motion picture industry, and here are located the clubs, bars, and beds where they spend their days and nights. The lurid events which take place in Desert D'Or are credible only if you can accept Mailer's views on the primacy...
...prettifying. If Anne's father (beautifully played by Joseph Schildkraut) is disciplined and quiet, her mother can be excitable; Dussel the dentist is fussy, Mr. Van Daan greedy. Under Garson Kanin's skillful direction, there is no more of an attempt at heartbreaking gaiety than at lurid gloom; there is chiefly a day-by-day liveliness, a gradual learning to walk-and on tiptoe-among eggs...