Word: passional
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Poet Archibald MacLeish's Passion Play based on the four Gospels...
...Private Affairs of Bel Ami (Loew-Lewin; United Artists) is the latest example of Albert Lewin's passion for bringing musky literary classics to the screen. Writer-Director Lewin is responsible for movie versions of Maugham's The Moon & Sixpence and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. His adaptation of Maupassant's coldly sardonic novel Bel Ami is his smoothest job to date. But it also clearly defines the limitations of Mr. Lewin's kind of movie...
Versilov, calm and complex, also represents the resilient man who, in an age of chaos, manages somehow not to be destroyed, protecting himself and his ideals of honor and love with a hotchpotch armory of friendly tolerance, extreme reserve, silence, outbursts of passion and generosity, unyielding pride and unexpected humbleness. Like Dostoevsky himself, Versilov desires to love God and his neighbor-and is suspicious of such desires ("Very proud people like to believe in God, especially those who despise other people. . . . They turn to God to avoid doing homage to man [because] to do homage...
...admit some place for Greek and any other kind of true thinking. Agape will be God's love, which takes the initiative and gives the power to men to be 'the sons of God.' On the one side, then, there will be man with a passion which seeks for deliverance from himself and simultaneously a just regard for himself and his own perfection; and on the other, God who respects man's integrity while lifting him up into a new relation of love with Himself. With such a correction of both views the violent dissimilarities vanish...
Such realism is a passion with the Grand-Guignol. The stop-at-nothing tradition was established by Founder Max Maurey, who died last week. It was carried on by the late Andre de Lorde, "Le Prince de la Terreur," the man who wrote the two favorite plays and many other Grand-Guignol classics. Says an old De Lorde fan: "He was a mild, sweet little man, always smiling...