Word: mephistophelean
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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What is powerful in Here Come the Clowns is not its tricky story nor its Sunday-school philosophy but its ominous, troubled atmosphere. The hypnotic "illusionist," with his Mephistophelean sense of evil; the hysterical emotions of the dazed people he operates upon; the submerged, intolerable griefs that he forces them to stammer out-these have the kind of horror found in Thomas Mann's famed story Mario and the Magician. Melodramatic, a little shrill, a little unearthly, Here Come the Clowns is like a grotesque tune played on a broken fiddle...
...Francis of Assisi, envisioned finally as a 150-ft. figure of glittering stainless steel. His first model for this won the approval of the local WPA, of Archbishop John Joseph Mitty, and, in the end, of the San Francisco art commission. Leading U. S. Franciscans, however, called it a "Mephistophelean monstrosity...
...that almost anything he did thereafter would be a painful anticlimax. Last week, the activities of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor attained a crescendo of anticlimax that was almost as newsworthy as the abdication. The crescendo started with the arrival in the U. S. last fortnight of a Mephistophelean little Franco-American efficiency expert, named Charles E. Bedaux, as advance agent for the proposed Windsor tour of the U. S. to study housing and industry, scheduled to start this week (TIME...
Equipped with chin whiskers which give him the traditional appearance of a doctor, Illinois' little Senator James Hamilton Lewis lives up to it by taking a lively interest in medicine. To members of the profession, however, Senator Lewis' whiskers may well seem less medical than Mephistophelean. Last month he appeared before the convention of the American Medical Association to predict that doctors were in danger of becoming nationalized as officers of the Federal Government in recompense for which the Government might pay the medical bills of citizens who could not afford to do so themselves (TIME, June...
...began to get starring roles in German pictures. Alternating them with stage work, she was a guest star in the Berliner Theatre when Josef von Sternberg saw her. After the show he went backstage-the squat, little man with a sharp face and Mephistophelean mustache. The strange career of Josef von Sternberg was just coming into its exotic bloom. Born Joe Stern in Vienna, Austria in 1894, he had risen from the cutting room, gambled his savings in a freelance silent picture, Salvation Hunters. Fame had come with The Last Command, Dragnet, Docks of New York, The Case of Lena...