Word: morbidly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...roles are expertly handled, especially the curious roster of people living in the Count's ancestral chateau: the Count's morphine-addicted mother (Bette Davis), who keeps to her bed and board (chess); his neurotic wife (Irene Worth); his young daughter (Annabel Bartlett) with a passion for the more morbid aspects of hagiolatry...
...brassy rages, sometimes shrieks in lines of shrill angularity, sometimes surprises with passages of softly breathing lyricism. The stark horror of the murder is conveyed in a howling, brassy crescendo in the orchestra that gives way abruptly to the tinselly tinkle of a café piano; Wozzeck's morbid fears are unforgettably etched in a single, slithering pianissimo in the strings; the cowardice that lurks beneath the captain's bluster becomes apparent in his occasional lapses into shrill, falsetto shrieking...