Word: manias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this big, wide-ranging movie, scope is stressed at the expense of depth, and there is no time to develop any very complex characters. The most interesting of the lot is the fanatic British colonel, all of whose actions stem from one trait: conscientiousness carried to the point of mania. Alec Guinness plays him with deft stiffness. His torture scenes are appropriately ghastly, and he resists the temptation to clown. William Holden gives his usual performance as a soldier who escapes from the prison camp and returns to blow up the bridge. Jack Hawkins and Geoffrey Horne are his fellow...
...point that Gogol had been trying to make. "Preacher of the lash," he called the muddled genius. After his first success. Gogol left Russia in a huff, spent twelve nostalgic years in self-imposed exile. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, slowly developed a religious mania and fell into the hands of a fanatic Russian Orthodox priest who persuaded Gogol that art was sinful. Thus an artist who all his life had been dissatisfied with his own work and had often burned manuscripts in the interests of perfection now burned his manuscripts in the interests...
...fact, Johnston feels that one of the worst aspects of the contemporary theatre is the mania for plays "made to order" with a deadline rather than written freely for their creative brilliance and original dialogue...
...less unique but still popular off-shoot of the imported transportation mania is the cult of the little car. The little car can be anything from an Austin to a Renault or Volkswagen (never a Hillman Minx, of course); it has unusual features, such as the engine being in back (which makes for question-provoking louvres where the trunk lid should be), or turn signals that point out from the door posts instead of blinking from the rear fenders, lending a quaint, Old World flavor. The real virtue of the little car, of course, lies just in its being little...
Into umbrous, ill-ventilated underground caverns, seemingly as necessary to life as the air-raid shelters where some of the visitors were born, thousands of bemused young Londoners squeeze nightly to stomp and holler their approval of Britain's latest musical mania: U.S. rock 'n' roll, commercial hillbilly and folk music, warmed over and juiced up in a mishmash called skiffle...