Word: moralize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...true that an intense, emotional atmosphere can push people strongly in the direction of what a radical-romantic believes to be the right decisions. This raises a fierce moral problem; there is a question of individual conscience, the right to remain constricted, one might say. I hear my heroes laughing at my very rhetoric, so I will switch to a tactical argument: stable liberation, whatever it might mean, must be reaction to internal needs, not to external circumstances. It is mere intellectual arrogance to point out to a Harvard student that the life is being squeezed...
...host of lesser strange touches, partly in Ulmer's visual style and partly in the fine acting. These touches make the film the masterpiece it is. They constantly reveal the personalities of the characters--especially the two leads, whose traits and drives take in all mutations of moral position and psychological experience. Karloff initially seems perverse and decadent; Lugosi, virtuous. But Lugosi's night-marish past experience and present insecurity drive him to acts of dreadful savagery even as we begin to see that Karloff's aristocratic veneer conceals the longing for beauty of a great artist...
...accident that these events are odd. Certain branches of the novel of personal change have long toyed with extreme metaphors for psychological and moral progress. Poe and Hawthorne, for example, used poison and death in connection with love and self-realization. The moral weight they put on psychological experience resembles Freud's--whose ideas are so dear to American screenwriters. Ulmer is certainly Freudian--see Ruthless or Murder is My Beat. But his stylization moves him beyond Freud in his view motivation and personal development. The rapidity of the changes he puts his characters through makes these changes seem ambiguous...
...critics go after cigarette advertising rather than attempt to outlaw the product itself? In practical terms, any sort of Volstead-style prohibition of cigarettes would be impossible to legislate, and any such legislation impossible to enforce. For all the difficult moral and legal questions involved, the anti-tobacco forces consider a drive on marketing to be the best way to confront the cigarette...
...prices, tend to escalate. In Bullet Park, trying to cope with up-to-date exurban alarums and filial excursions-including creeping despair and the generation gap -has widened farther than ever the consistent gap between Cheever's surface realism and the bizarre events and distorted perspectives of the moral allegories he pursues...