Word: prurients
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Kind of Ignorance. Alarmed at the Catholic tendency to judge a work of art according to prurient standards of "decency," says Kerr, professional critics tend to take an unreasoning position against any form of censorship; equally alarmed at this anarchic attitude, Catholics damn all critics as "artsakists" who are insensitive to sin and indifferent to its effects. Wise censorship simply means the exercise of prudence, says Kerr, but "the censor is not acting out of clear knowledge. He is acting in a kind of ignorance." And he should proceed with great caution for fear of destroying something good...
...metaphysical aspirations. The death of a boxer is seen as a boxer would see it. Any Bogie film is good; this one isn't. It has Rod Steiger, whose mock-murderous mood makes it a smash, and Jan Sterling, who could have been the sexually-repressed daughter of a prurient minister. As we said to our companion as we came out of the U.T., The Harder They Fall is a sweaty, brutal, and challenging social document...
...women in Summer and Smoke are on the whole competent, but the men are lame, and the result is a limping pace. The superiority of the women is partially because Williams' hysterical females are naturally rich roles. Alma Winemiller, the sexually-repressed daughter of a prurient minister, is certainly a ready-made vehicle for fine acting, and Georgia Boyko fills the part admirably. Simultaneously repulsing and desiring the advances of young Dr. John Buchanan, Miss Boyko portrays her hysteria with a certain delicacy and restraint which make her character both distinctive and convincing. When she is severe with her mother...
...conducted by the two members of a love affair, the interminable sentences curl so concentrically and wearily that they come to sound like a playback on a run-down phonograph. The Bowenism is a sight more readable. Letitia, Emeritus, the story of a "backward" girl whose seduction by a prurient old teacher topples a domino-row of calamities, is managed with the firm Bowen wrist and the sure fingering of details. Yet, somehow, though Author Calisher has fingered her characters, she has not felt them, and does not make a reader feel them...
...Ronde is all of a piece, as any round should be, setting up a mocking harmony of desire and disillusion, vanity, pleasure and deceit. It is never prurient, smirking or pornographic. For all the intimacy of its nuances, the film's approach is dryly detached and completely charming; it spoofs sex rather than exploits it, much as Britain's satiric Kind Hearts and Coronets makes sport of murder...