Word: passional
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Infinite Variety. The country exhibited no discernible unrest, no passion for plunging toward new ideas or new philosophies. Literature leaned heavily on the historical novel which, by a curious transformation, seemed to provide the only public expression of the libido. Historical novels were most noteworthy for their dust jackets, all of which seemed to boast a red-lipped siren with a low-cut dress and an incredibly pneumatic bust. U.S. intellectuals, who had once ranged from the Paris Left Bank to Communism's left wing, had come home to roost. It was a little saddening to the more daring...
Here again is Southern woman sore beset, hounded by desire and hobbled by gentility, and wrecked not so much by passion as by the attempt to give it a prettier name, to deny its carnal nature. Alma Winemiller (Margaret Phillips) is a minister's repressed, highfalutin daughter, passionately in love with the hell-raising son of the doctor next door. Possibly John Buchanan (nicely played by Tod Andrews) would have fallen for Alma had not her ladylike insistences, her chatter about the spiritual side of love, been too much for him. By the time Alma looks sex squarely...
...when Betsy Fauntleroy, 16, got him to the point where he popped the question. Betsy turned him down cold, not once but twice; and not even a letter to her father helped. Not until Washington began to wrestle with his hopeless passion for the married Sally Fairfax is there any sign of another serious love affair...
...Rembrandt "was himself an omnivorous collector whose eyes and appetites were, unfortunately, larger than his pocketbook . . . Not only was he a collector of paintings and drawings by the old masters . . . but his collection of prints contained a working library of ideas and iconographical suggestions. Moreover his passion for antique busts was rivaled only by his interest in weapons and ethnological specimens from America and the Indies. His paintings further show that he kept a vast costumery; among these were the magnificent vestments . . . which appear in his studies of Jewish rabbis and in the Biblical scenes...
Here & there, the movie has flashes of dramatic vitality and even of authenticity. Samples: the whole look and feel of Cambridge and Harvard, a generation ago; Horace charming a prospective father-in-law and a gaggle of stockbrokers; Mr. Greenstreet breathily declaring his passion for his low-necked, uninterested wife. But the long-suffering friend, inadvertently no doubt, finally becomes absurd and faintly contemptible. It all adds up to a strained, silly show...