Word: mann
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Poor but Rich. The key to the waste is environment. Comparing opposite ends of the social scale, Dean Horace Mann Bond of Atlanta University reports that "culturally disadvantaged" families produce only one talented youngster for every 235 from "culturally advantaged" families. In affluent suburbs, 25% of all youngsters score 125 or above on IQ tests. In poor neighborhoods, only 6% do so. The reason is partly that IQ tests, though aimed at measuring intelligence rather than learning, necessarily reflect "normal" exposure to books, conversation and even material gadgets. Without such riches, the bright slum kid seems to get dumber...
Even in these conventional contexts, the classic theme of salvation by prostitution preserves a little of its ancient power. The power is blunted-though commerce is served-by a glossy production (Pandro S. Berman), slick direction (Daniel Mann), solid but stolid performances, and a script (Charles Schnee and John Michael Hayes) that reads as though it had been copied off a washroom wall. Heroine to hero, with a broad wink, as she glides seductively down the hatch of his sailboat: "You can-uh-drop anchor any time." Motel proprietor to hero, who betrays a certain anxiety...
...Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Invitation to a Beheading, it was buried under critical neglect and popular apathy when it appeared, is now gaining a second life through the continuing Lolita boom. But Laughter in the Dark only superficially resembles Lolita; it is closer to the Heinrich Mann novel that became The Blue Angel, the famed Marlene Dietrich film of the same general setting and period. At its loftiest, Nabokov's theme is the degradation, by lust, of dignity and intellect-Shakespeare's "expense of spirit in a waste of shame...
What critics exhume is seldom the writer who was buried. Where Goethe found perversity and disease, critics today find "true greatness," "a hero of the modern spirit," a precursor of Stendhal, Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka. Thomas Mann, Germany's greatest 20th century novelist, calls Von Kleist in the preface (written in 1955) to this book a "storyteller of the very first order." In this first English translation of his collected stories, the proofs are not always convincing. The compulsive violence that runs through these tales (notably Michael Kohlhaas, The Earthquake in Chile...
Between shouting matches. Actor Preston gaily galumphs through some fine, if slightly incongruous, comedy scenes. Director Delbert Mann handles these scenes well, and only occasionally does he allow situations to descend to the level that is fondly known in the women's fiction trade as "heartwarming...