Word: morbidities
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...self-made emperor, bolted his love affairs the way he bolted his meals. Lovers, who had been pretty vigorous since the Renaissance, again began to talk about dying. A book on How to Succeed in Love, published in 1830, suggested fainting fits, attacks of hysteria, and suicide threats. Morbid romanticism subsequently gave way to liaisons based on credit ratings. Toward the end of the century, some courtesans were known to vary the price of their favors depending on the fluctuations of the stock market...
...practicing homosexual, a psychotic heroine, a procuress-mother, a cannibalistic orgy and a sadistic nun. Showman Spiegel, who to Hollywood's amazement won a seal of approval for S.L.S. from both the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency ("separately classified"), has shrewdly presented the whole morbid mess as "an adult horror picture" about a woman "who is suddenly too old to procure boys for her son." Says Spiegel: "Why, it's a theme the masses can identify themselves with...
...press any ease. "Can the Pope," asked he, "remain indifferent to press accounts which have nothing to do with instructions or honest information? Does his heart not suffer at the thought of the poison broadcast widely, without concern for so many innocents? Can it be legitimate to pander to morbid curiosity with details and descriptions that had better be left in the files of the police laboratories and the courts? Is it ever licit to use every criminal act, over which it would be better to draw a merciful veil, as an occasion for descriptions and reconstructions that are nothing...
Other Men's Deaths. Author West is a Roman Catholic, but his book is intensely Christian beyond the limits of creed. Like Graham Greene and Francois Mauriac, West is concerned with sin and redemptive grace, but without their somewhat morbid preoccupation with evil. Rarely has the vocation of a priest or the problems of leading a Christian life been explored with such dramatic passion and compassion. One quality is completely absent-what Author West himself calls the "peppermint piety" of the stock religious bestseller...
...direction and production. Where the original was visually stark and grimy, the remake, splashed with incongruously cheery color, has the phony patina of Palm Springs. The sets and scenery (some of it filmed in Bavaria) suggest a Victor Herbert operetta rather than German bourgeois society. And the hardbitten, even morbid truths hammered home in the German version become soft and mawkish half-truths under the hand of Hollywood's Edward Dmytryk, who has consented to a happy ending that makes the teacher's tragedy merely pathetic...