Word: motif
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Unlike sexy Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra, Emperor Jones contains no love motif. O'Neill's hero was a Negro convict, a one-time Pullman porter, crapshooter, murderer, who escaped to the West Indies, called himself Emperor, bled his native subjects until they turned on him, chased him into the jungle and destroyed him. Two grotesque African gods pillared the stage when the Metropolitan curtain went up last week and an off-stage chorus started shouting "He mus' die." Brasses blared savagely against a rattle of percussives. The first short scene made Metropolitan listeners fear that...
...arranged to blarney & bully the fear out of his patients. This is a recent reversal of Dr. Bloodgood's clinical attitude. Heretofore he has preached: get an early diagnosis, no matter if you must scare the wits out of the people. Anti-cancer propaganda has had a fear motif, condoned only for its salutary effect on a supposedly ignorant, obtuse public...
...tale Librettist Hammerstein has to tell variously interrupts or suddenly pounces upon or absentmindedly neglects the tunes which flow continuously from Composer Kern's brimming music box. Neither operetta, musicomedy nor revue, Music in the Air is billed simply as "a musical adventure." Scenes are labeled Leit Motif, Etudes, Pastoral, Impromptu, Sonata...
...itself to masterly treatment. In "Blonde Venus" this theme is ruined by lurid, florid, tabloid handing which carries the mother from the arms of her Husband, to stardom in a revue, to prostitution, to stardom in a revue, to prostitution, to stardom in a revue, and with the leit motif of "a little child shall lead them," back to the arms of her husband. The whole amounts to exactly nothing as an intelligent or entertaining treatment of the problem...
...motif of this, the seventh and last part of the novel, is Time and Change. Throughout the years Proust traces, things and people have slowly altered, but it took the war to give the final impetus for the complete reversal of the Paris society, the society of the "Guermantes set," he pictures. From the time that the narrator sees the stricken M. de Charlus bow like a slave before Mme. de Sainte-Euverte, a woman he had always refused to recognize, till the author decides to write this work, it is the change that has come about that he emphasizes...