Word: prim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stood before a judge in the courtroom of Offenburg (pop. 28,000) last week, the very look of Ludwig Pankraz Zind, 51, betrayed his past. His slim body was ramrod-erect, a prim, Hitler-like mustache decorated his face. On his left cheek were the proud, ugly scars of old duels. After his Heidelberg student days, Zind had become a Nazi Storm Trooper, then a reserve captain in the Wehrmacht on the Russian front. Back in Offenburg after the war, he was first barred from his old teaching post by the Allies, but in 1948 he got his job back...
...pregnant, James resolves to divorce Annette, but face to face with the supine, trusting invalid, he holds his tongue. The memorable story evokes a morbid doll's house in which death is pink with black edges, like some outrageous hybrid flower. Also outstanding: the thumbnail sketch of the prim, man-hating aunt, who all but says out loud that a marriage in which sex is prohibited by doctor's orders is a noncon-summation devoutly to be wished...
Director Preminger has done well with his actors, too. David Niven is remarkable as the sort of rake that accumulates his life in his face, like a pile of dead leaves. Deborah Kerr provides one transcendent scene in which, as she overhears her man with another woman, her prim, pretty English face breaks up like a cooky in the fingers of a child. And Jean Seberg, rebounding from her disastrous debut as Joan of Arc (TIME, July 1), blooms with just the right suggestion of unhealthy freshness, a cemetery flower...
...England town is filmed with neither the whales-and-ale quaintness of a picture postcard nor the brooding gloom of an H. P. Lovecraft horror story. Camden, Me. (chosen for the film setting because Gilmanton, N.H., where Novelist Metalious wrote the book, does not look the part) is prim, bleak or beautiful, but never stagy, and the townsfolk extras look and act like people. What is even rarer, so do most of the actors. Dialogue between a couple of beady-eyed spring peepers at a swimming hole: "Nekkid?" "Nekkid!" Arthur Kennedy, as a bestial Yankee shack dweller, is frightening...
...jungles of Thailand during World War II, where British prisoners, at forced labor, are building a railroad from Bangkok to Rangoon. At one prison camp along the way, the fanatical Japanese commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), is having trouble. The senior officer of a new consignment of prisoners, a prim old pukka sahib named