Word: motherless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Anne Carlsen was born in Grantsburg, Wis., she had only stubs of arms ending above the elbow, her right leg ended above the knee, and the left was malformed, ending in a clubfoot. Left motherless at four, Anne got tireless encouragement from her father, an elder sister and four brothers. On a coaster wagon she learned to take part in a modified version of baseball. At eight she was pronounced ready for school, but only after a psychologist had gone over her and solemnly pronounced her "educable." Anne raced through two grades a year...
...Leopold and Richard Loeb) are wealthy, brilliant young law students at the University of Chicago. Straus-Loeb, as portrayed by Bradford Dillman, is the spoiled-rotten son of a socialite mother. At 18, he is already a vicious little sadist. Steiner-Leopold, as Dean Stockwell interprets him, is a motherless young genius whose IQ is too high to be measured by any known intelligence test-essentially a gentle boy who has been completely mesmerized by the animal magnetism of his evil companion. Straus-Loeb is the superman, Steiner-Leopold the "superior slave" in a private world of post-Nietzschean fantasy...
Onto the television screen flashes the image of a widowed U.S. worker, five little girls and a boy huddled around him. Their problem is spelled out to the viewer: what does a man do if he has six motherless children and no hope of a job? Answers the worker: "I don't want to put them in a home. The nearest thing for me is the river, but that's a horrible thought...
Then the Japanese attack, and for the rest of the movie, Bergman drifts among the battles like a montage of Brünnhilde and Florence Nightingale-until she turns, toward the end, into Mrs. Moses, and marches about 100 motherless children across miles of rugged country, through the enemy's lines, to safety with the Chinese forces...
...According to Webster's: "After S. A. Maverick (1803-70), a Texas cattle owner who did not brand his calves, 1) An unbranded animal, esp. a motherless calf; 2) a refractory individual who bolts his group and initiates an independent course." Garner's own definition: "A sort of freewheeling slick...