Word: quasimodos
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...Swedish Academy dug way down in the literary barrel for this year's Nobel Prizewinner in literature: Sicilian-born Poet Salvatore Quasimodo, 58, onetime Communist and longtime friend of Red causes, a versifier whose intricate Italian style and deeply personal themes make him incomprehensible to most Italians. Quipped one Italian writer, mystified...
...Quasimodo's sudden celebrity: "I'm sure his works have been translated only into Swiss!" In Milan, where he teaches literature at the Giuseppe Verdi Music Conservatory, Quasimodo was quite pleased by the honor (value: $42,606) that shocked Italy's literary world. But even in his hour of triumph, he found a moment to demean the merit of Soviet Author Boris (Doctor Zhiuago) Pasternak, reluctant rejecter of last year's Nobel award. Huffed Nobelman Quasimodo: "Pasternak is as far from this generation as the moon is from us." Quasimodo is an expert of sorts...
...Chicago or at sea. That was during the Hutchins-Adler Great Books era, and it subsequently appeared that being at the University of Chicago then, or at sea, was more or less one and the same thing. The architectural magnificence of the Robie House still escapes me. Like Quasimodo, it is imposing but grotesque. I think the master's most beautiful creation, though indirect and not Architectonic, is his granddaughter Anne Baxter, the movie star...
...Hunchback of Notre Dame (Paris; Allied Artists) offers a Quasimodo (Anthony Quinn) who is as ugly as an iguana, but as lovable as a kitten and no more frightening. In two earlier filmings of Victor Hugo's romance, Lon Chaney (1923) and Charles Laughton (1939) took care to spook the audience out of its wits before building up sympathy for the. lovesick, crookbacked bell ringer. But the current Technicolor version (with a French supporting cast, dubbed-in English) introduces Notre Dame's resident troll tenderly stroking a pigeon on one of the cathedral's balustrades...
Actor Quinn emotes piteously with his left eye (his right one is matted shut by makeup that realistically puffs, thickens and distorts his entire head to a sub-Neanderthal bestiality), and it seems a shocking breach of manners when Esmeralda, Quasimodo's barefooted gypsy love (amiably played by Gina Lollobrigida), recoils at sight of him. Actor Quinn has done too thorough a job of making his monster human...