Word: motif
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Tyrone Power plays Eddy with unflagging boyishness, and Kim Novak acts the doomed Marjorie Oelrichs with spectral intimations ("Hold me, Eddy; I'm afraid of the wind . . ."). This blowy motif runs throughout the film: death's advent is always heralded by wind-driven snow, rain or autumn leaves. A stately newcomer, Australia's Victoria Shaw, is introduced as Duchin's second wife, and a pair of clipped-accented moppets (Mickey Maga and Rex Thompson) perform as the Duchin child at different ages. Moviegoers may enjoy the rippling piano notes (actually played by Carmen Cavallaro) that made...
Party orators were out in corps force; they included nearly all the Cabinet, many of the White House staffers, more than a score of Republican governors, Senators and Representatives. The motif was partisan right down to the "First Lady Salad" in Spokane and the "Fresh Asparagus Spears Nixon" in Cleveland. There were the inevitable bloopers: in New York's dingy Madison Square Garden a television screen went blank just as the President began speaking, came brightly back just as he finished. There was evidence of ward-level tricksters at work: the Los Angeles dinner committee, dominated by Nixon supporters...
Mann's familiar style supports his efforts as well as ever. There is the firm German repetition of motif. We are constantly reminded of Krull's nakedness and his false drapery of forms and decorum. His costumes--which bolstered his youthful fancies--become foreign tongues and social manners. His adaptability constantly recurs so that we even expect him to talk like a paleontologist within minutes after meeting...
...precisely. "I have to disappoint at first," he confided to his journal. "I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe; ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest, to work out by myself a tiny, formal motif, one that my pencil will be able to encompass without any technique . . . Pictures will more than fill the whole of my lifetime ... it is less a matter of will than of fate...
...Episodes of space travel are by no means rare in the imaginings of the mentally ill," says Plank. Equally symptomatic is the "last man" motif, in which all mankind has been annihilated save for one individual-or, more productively, a fertile couple, "Far from being a byproduct of atomic fission," Plank contends, this theme goes back to Greek mythology and "grows from the fertile soil of unconscious drives." Such standard schizophrenic symptoms as delusions of grandeur, of persecution, and of superhuman influence are science-fiction staples...