Word: nuns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Requiem for a Nun (by William Faulkner) is a journey through the dark night of the soul with a hint of dawn beyond. Its characters do not have the stature for tragedy, yet it is dense with guilt, pity and terror, and it frequently grips the audience in its palm like sinners in the hands of an angry...
...crime is a mere postscript to the horror-gorged life of her mistress, the dead child's mother, who is enslaved to the devil in the flesh. Mrs. Gowan Stevens was formerly Temple Drake, society-girl heroine of Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, to which Requiem for a Nun is a sequel. While the law has dealt with Nancy, it is the Furies of the past that hound Temple Drake...
...uncle-in-law (implacably played by Zachary Scott), Temple tells all in a flashback confessional. It is a litany of lust and degradation. Eight years before, Temple had been kidnaped by a spiderish hoodlum named Popeye, kept six weeks in a Memphis brothel, and ''loved it." ("Nun" is a 19th century word for whore.) A year later Temple married the slack-spined Virginia gentleman, Gowan Stevens, who had been too drunk at the time of the kidnaping to protect her. It is only when Temple proposes to relive the bad old days with an ex-lover...
Requiem for a Nun is no requiem, and its "nun" is a 17th century word for whore. It was adapted by Novelist William Faulkner from his 1951 sequel to his 1930s shocker, Sanctuary. The story is a further look at Temple Drake (Ruth Ford), the Sanctuary college girl who landed in a Memphis brothel-and loved it. In Requiem, Temple has become a guilt-ridden, respectable wife, grappling for salvation. Boston critics agreed that it promised spiritual significance, but found it dramatically static. The Catholic Pilot's George E. Ryan commended it for "daring to grapple with the question...
Readers of some Roman Catholic magazines were encouraged to buy a "Little Nun" or a "Little Priest" in 40-or 45-in. sizes, each $8.95. "Watch," says the ad, "how [children] will assume the quiet dignity of those who have dedicated their lives to the Church." But Christianity's smash commercial success is a song, composed by Disk Jockey George Donald McGraw. 30, of Salem, Va., who got tired of hearing "songs about funny animals, Santa Claus and filter cigarettes" at Christmastime and decided that "everybody was kind of starved for something real sincere." The something Deejay McGraw provided...