Word: puritans
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America's Puritan sense tends to regard evil in stark terms of black and white. It has been pointed out endlessly, and correctly, that the western, with its crude division of good guys and bad guys, is the nation's archetypal art form. Evil has thus been transmogrified, whenever possible, into the definable, detestable enemy-like Hitler, say-who could always be defeated by the forces of justice. The national instinct to juxtapose good and evil is summed up with only a touch of irony by W. H. Auden's nostalgic reference to simpler times...
Indeed, Seastrom made a remarkably calm film from a rather violent novel. largely by establishing and developing unified situations. The opening sets the scene and its characters in one long track along the village street. moving back as Puritans walk to church. To establish a social milieu Griffith would have cut between different characters. their homes, their personal peculiarities. Seastrom needs only one long shot that shows the Puritan villagers in a characteristic action and place. He uses the setting strongly and gives us masses of people never developed as characters. This leaves the drama far fewer contending moral...
...Reed, who will make his screen debut as Myron Breckinridge, Myra's alter ego: "Raquel is a very complex girl. She is terribly, terribly interested in being taken seriously. She has elected to be a movie star, but underneath that creamy skin and those bulging blouses beats a Puritan heart. She is a Jane Austen heroine, and the conflict has made her uptight...
...Raquel has a shy Puritan heart, she also has the kind of forthright Puritan mind that in early America could probably have reconciled Scripture with slaving and rum-running. On-screen she may be the ultimate prehistoric predator, but in real life she is a carefully pre-fabricated commodity, a paradigm of the harddriving, self-made New Woman who just happened to choose acting as a career. "I'll admit I'm extremely strong-minded," says Raquel. "I don't know any other...
...temptation to extend the differences between the two sections to the people is strong. One immediately thinks to himself: Small town America, pastoral and puritan. Such a conclusion, however, would ultimately be misleading. All the trappings-and attitudes-of modern civilization can be found in Great Barrington. It is no Shangri...