Word: narcissus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...begin with, Huston picked players who were not only presold to the public but pre-studied in their parts as well. Deborah Kerr played a nun in Black Narcissus ; Robert Mitchum has done no fewer than four tours of duty as a cinema serviceman. Under Huston's sharp eye, they both give good standard performances. Actress Kerr, whose makeup man went a bit too far with the cloistral pallor, sometimes looks as if she had cut her veins as well as her hair; but Actor Mitchum, even though as usual he does nothing but slob around the screen...
...only guide to happiness . . . our father, our leader, our light, our food, our redemption, our way, our truth, our life." Fra Dominici exhorted the young monks: "As the years of tender youth flow by, the soft wax may take on any form. Stamp on it the impress not of Narcissus, Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede, but of the crucified Christ and of the saints." It was to this effort that Fra Angelico, for whom the goal both of life and art was "the contemplation and realization of Beauty," devoted the rest of his life...
...selection of the Book- of-the-Month Club for December, An Episode of Sparrows may well prove the book of the year for those who are not ashamed to weep over the printed page. Far from the Indian scenes on which she founded her literary fame (Black Narcissus, The River), Author Godden here tries her deft writing hand at landscaping a child's heart, letting the teardrops fall where they...
...cited a critic who attacked Joseph Conrad for wasting time on mundane activities in "The Nigger of the Narcissus." "Those mundane things are life, and when criticism begins to regret life it is time to try to conceive more generously," he said...
IMPUNITY JANE, by Rumer Godden (Viking; $2.50), boasts one of the smallest heroines in recent fiction: a four-inch china doll. Impunity, like Ibsen's Nora, rebels against the doll's house, so Author Godden (The River, Black Narcissus) treats her to a high old time as the mascot of a bunch of boys who send her aloft with a toy balloon, spin her on a Catherine wheel and race her across a pond in a toy yacht...