Word: mordant
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...themselves and whirled away in the tremendous whirlwind of the spirit of the age they have wrung out of their hearts remarkable efforts of film. They have evolved through the last decade a vast pageant of heroic drama and gentle eclogue, of delectable gaiety and dispirited lust, of mordant wit, glittering intellect, grey despair, apocalyptic spectacle and somber religious depth. They have held the camera up to life and shown humanity a true and terrifying and yet somehow heartbreakingly beautiful image of itself. They have created a golden age of cinema...
...answer, as interpreted by actors such as Paul Scofield and the late Louis Calhern, is that the seeds of madness have always lain dormant in Lear, ready at the slightest pretext to sprout. But Carnovsky has a more mordant and, in many ways, a more tragic view. Lear, he contends, is everyman; his disasters are everyman's and the tragedy in Shakespeare's eye "is not in Lear himself, but in life." When Carnovsky's Lear, reeling like a wounded animal, howls forth
That conclusion may at first seem small recompense for the private hells the characters have been wallowing in. Yet such is the power of Author Mortimer's mordant vision that the wife's resignation finally appears as the sort of accommodation any loving murderer might wish...
Daughter Kattrin is a war-victimized mute with a desperate love of children. In Brecht's mordant view, kindness is voiceless in the world. Kattrin performs the only noble and impassioned act in the play when she mounts a platform and beats out a drum tattoo warning a sleeping town of ambush. A single musket shot silences her. Zohra Lampert detonates this episode shatteringly after having made her Kattrin an intaglio of forlorn brooding poignance. As Anne Bancroft cradles her daughter in marble stillness, the scene has the desolating sadness of a Piet...
Lesson for Today. Yet though the prophets have gone, still "the world is dark, and human agony is excruciating." Although Heschel does not expressly argue it in his book, he believes that man today is called upon to be prophetlike-last week in Chicago he was a mordant critic of religion's ineffectiveness in U.S. race questions (see below). Born in Warsaw, the descendant of a long line of Hasidic rabbis, Heschel earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin, but was expelled by the Nazis to Poland in 1938. He left for England six weeks before the outbreak...