Word: morbidity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year-old male teacher constantly addresses 14 and 15-year-old girls as 'You growing mothers,' then the still slumbering feminine soul rebels," wrote the Nazi Mother. Her own 15-year-old daughter, she declared, changed from a happy, healthy child into one given to morbid brooding and thoughts of suicide after having to fill pages of her notebook with scientific data on venereal disease and physiological drawings...
Though Chinese often take a morbid pleasure in exaggerating the statistics of their woe, the Government seemed justified in thinking last week that at least 25,000,000 Chinese face anything from inundation of their homes to starvation or drowning as a result of the floods now loosed...
...Pierre Louys, filmed in Director von Sternberg's best darkly sardonic style, The Devil Is a Woman is a slow, rococo anecdote about the vicious sex-life of a Spanish cafe dancer (Dietrich) and the middle-aged army officer (Lionel Atwill) whose career is shattered by his morbid passion for her. Infinitely more adult in its approach to human values than such a picture as The Scoundrel (see above), this effort by one of Hollywood's most famed directors is correspondingly more childish in its manner. After winding through an interminable succession of overdecorated scenes, in which flashbacks...
...struggle with his own fate. It starts when Jean Valjean (Fredric March), represented as a deserving member of the Paris unemployed, is sentenced to the galleys for ten years for stealing a loaf of bread. There he first encounters Javert (Charles Laughton), the police inspector whose morbid fixation on the letter of the law makes him, as long as he lives, Valjean's Nemesis. When they meet again years later, Valjean is the beneficent mayor of a prosperous provincial town. But that makes no difference to Javert who ferrets out the secret of the mayor's past...
...author over-plays the conflict and distorts his character out of the realm of reality but many more times he makes us experience the very emotions that drove Vridar to despair. There is no denying the intensity and vividness of the novel. On the other hand, the all-prevailing morbid tone often distorts the view so that it may not be seen from a proper vantage point...