Word: moralization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...humor, masterfully plays the Svengali to his pickup cast of raw amateurs-whom he inspires not to act but to live out their feelings with an artless art. Essentially, Neorealists De Sica and Zavattini have not changed their cinematic method, but they seem to have revised their social and moral philosophy. In their earlier films they raged at social injustice. In The Roof they are not really angry. Instead of asking the spectator to hate the world, they help him to love the people it hurts...
...Wyeth remarks late in the novel. "You just gotta learn to compromise where it counts. Right?" But as Steiner points out, "The trouble is, where does it count?" This, alas, is a problem both for Steiner and Zane. Where does one draw a distinction between the moral and immoral? Neither Wyeth, Steiner, nor Zane seems to be particularly concerned with this question except to the extent that they raise it, then let it drop...
...Steiner's contempt for respectable America, the land of the free and the bourgeoisie, certainly implies a moral judgment that leads us to ask why Steiner is justified in rejecting those social regulations which transform the chaotic into the orderly, or in condemning those who seem to be more principled and responsible than himself. No matter how often we ask, however, Zane leaves us in a moral haziness, which leads us in turn to suspect that he doesn't know how to solve the moral dilemma he has generated. Perhaps this is because he has known too well these strange...
...precisely this failure to take a stand, however, that turns Easy Living into a trite account of the nocturnal habits of a seedy set of people. In the absence of any moral clarity, either in defense of or opposition to this new life, we are left with a gutless congregation of men and women--shallow, mechanical, colorless--who do absurd things and utter ridculous statements but who never seem to be aware of their own humanity...
...always with Brecht, there is the sense of an original, individual talent, undiverted and uncompromising, stubbornly being true to itself. This sounds like a moral rather than an aesthetic virtue, but it insures that Puntila, though often repetitive and clumsy, sometimes even boring, is seldom commonplace...