Word: oneness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Referring to the 2200 fasters Mendelsohn said, "I was very pleased to see these numbers participating. This is a very significant group when one looks at the total student body...
...gestures personally significant. Menjou is eating dinner with Ricardo Cortez in the grandest of opulent restaurants. The conversation takes an odd tack. Menjou pivots his head slightly, and Griffith cuts away to a bevy of side-lit dancing girls, the floor show, advancing and twisting. This cut, inexplicable if one tries to find in it some definite comment on Menjou's character greatly enlarges the weight of his gesture, draining a world from a hint of sentiment. And Griffith cuts not on the formal qualities of the two shots, or on their content, but on the ideal power that runs...
...business Griffith picked to reveal the central relation of the film. After Cortez has bought his wife-to-be a cup and saucer they stand outside a pawnshop, facing the camera, admiring the cup. A woman comes up to them, takes a look at it, and passes off to one side. We never see her face: her action is ambiguous, it is not expressly directed to the characters we know. But her action brings out their wedding-purchase and what it means to them...
GRIFFITH'S restraint, simplicity, and economy of means pay off in increased dramatic force for every action. There's less detail, but it's all out front, working directly on us. His control of secondary incidents is complete: one gasps when a man with dark glasses simply appears at Cortez's wedding and stands in front of Dempster. Our terror increases when in close-ups, her face is partly blocked by the edge of his sleeve...
...complexity of Sorrows' sustained mood and action seems at first to be betrayed by its ending. Cortez, pursued by the shadow of Satan, flees to his true love. One thinks this is a cheap trick to get them back together and achieve a happy ending. It substitutes the crudest of cardboard religious symbolism for serious moral change. But the really cheap ending would have had Cortez repent and return of his own will. Force is required to return this malcontent to the women who loves...