Word: moralist
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Gates of Paris (Filmsonor; Lopert). Rene Clair is a moralist who never moralizes. In this picture, for instance, his moral is a weighty one. Evil is not evil, Clair says, if it does good; in real life the absolutes are relative. Yet the point is made lightly, and it hits home with benevolent accuracy...
...explains to his reluctant accomplice (Georges Brassens): "At last I'm useful." Ah yes, Director Clair seems to sigh, the forces of law and order do have such a difficult time-good is almost impossible to stamp out. But then, so is evil, and in the end the moralist acknowledges that...
Four Winds is rather like something by Noel Coward as adapted by a German moralist and retranslated into English. In a certain sense, through its own gift of tediousness and soggy small talk, it mirrors an expensively empty world. But its truths are the dreariest truisms, its gamut a mere shuttling between the plushy and the preachy. It gives no new wrinkle to the lowlifes in highlife. Only the jangled sharpness with which English Actress Ann Todd plays the heroine has any resonance; all else is a blur of echoes and a drone of words...
Nehru's own defiance of a 10-to-0 Security Council resolution on Kashmir (TIME, Feb. 4) was the last straw. With one voice Britons of every political coloration last week proclaimed their disillusionment with Moralist Nehru. "It is shameful to remember that India is still a member of the Commonwealth," said the conservative weekly Time and Tide. "Willful stubbornness," snapped the Liberal News Chronicle. Even Nehru's favorite British publication, the shocking-pink New Statesman and Nation, abandoned its usual faithful praise of everything Indian to warn Nehru that he had "gravely impaired his influence...
After World War II, French existentialists found new kinship with Sade's bitter cynicism. Simone de Beauvoir called him a "great writer and a great moralist." Albert Camus argued that Sade explained Naziism's "reduction of man to an object of experiment." Psychologists conceded that in his recognition of the impulse to cruelty in sexual relations, he anticipated some of Freud's thinking. Responding to this interest, alert, young Publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert printed a 28-volume set of Sade's complete works, put them on public sale for the first time in France in unexpurgated...