Word: moralization
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What might have shocked the censors is its gay freedom from what most of America considers fairly absolute morals--a count and his wife, for example, bet each other, as part of the dinner table conversation at a party, that the wife cannot seduce the man on his right in fifteen minutes (the same man, incidentally, whom the Count recently met in his--the Count's--nightshirt at the house of their mutual mistress); they bet; the woman later turns out to have won--and in eight minutes, not fifteen. Good for Boston. Cultural relativism. Moral perspectives. Jolly good...
...Little Acre (Security Pictures; United Artists) is a literary locale in the moral sump at the dead end of Tobacco Road, and Novelist Erskine Caldwell mucked about in it so merrily that his novel has sold more than 8,000,000 copies in 25 years. Cleaned up for the cinema public, Caldwell's Acre still contains enough rich, smelly dirt to grow a mort of the sort of lettuce Hollywood loves best...
While Novelist Donleavy owes his Blooming manner to Joyce (and some of his fertilizer to Spillane), his hero's bad manners borrow something from the Angry Young Men, those moral slummers who came to scoff and remained to stay. Like the suffering wife of the slob-hero of John Osborne's eponymous Look Back in Anger, Dangerfield's masochistically martyred Marion is from the top people, and like that hero, Dangerfield snarls and yaps like a dog in a bear...
...that everybody you look at seems to be a rabbit. Now just what did you mean by that, Mrs. Sprague?" bears directly on this issue. The lady fears sex. She sees all men as potentially sexual creatures, and confuses this fear with the rabbits who so flagrantly violate her moral standards. The psychiatrist himself becomes a rabbit, for he shares with the beast the secret of sex. He speaks the dark words men hope to hear yet fear to utter. The fear of self-knowledge which inhibits Americans renders the successor of Freud a figure of subconscious sexual dislike--hence...
Stone is a key witness in the imaginary affaire Dujardin, which has for post-World War II France all the moral and political catnip of a Dreyfus case. Dujardin, a member of the French underground, is in jail, has been marked for death as one of the guilty who directed the massacre of a whole French village called Montpelle (which calls to mind France's nonfictional Oradour-Sur-Glane). To the French Left he becomes a martyr, and "Liberez Dujardin" is scrawled on every wall in Paris. Only the evidence of Stone, who is now symbolical of the dead...