Word: reptilian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hard to figure who is at fault, or why, in the case of the much heralded Italian newcomer, Valli. Her beauty, or better-than-beauty, has an almost reptilian fascination; she is, indeed, the most fatale-looking femme since Garbo. But it remains an open question whether she can act. Hitchcock, keeping her nearly motionless, plies her with one slow, cold, lambent close-up after another. Some of these close-ups function forcefully in the storytelling; but too many are as nonfunctional as her frequent changes of hairdo. It looks as if Hitchcock, one of the smartest directors of women...
Coelophysis emerged from the slime of the Paleozoic Age 200 million years ago, an early step in the transition of life from amphibian to reptilian form. He roamed across North America, from New Mexico to New England. He had large, powerful legs, which carried him around swiftly, and powerful forepaws, well-equipped with claws. He was a ferocious carnivore. Eventually-about 60 million years ago-coelophysis, like all of his fearsome family, disappeared...
...song in a strange land? For the land in which the slaves found themselves was strange beyond the . fact that it was foreign. It was a nocturnal land of vast, shadowy pine woods, vast fields of cotton whose endless rows converged sometimes on a solitary cabin, vast swamps reptilian and furtive-a land alive with all the elements of lonely beauty, except compassion. In this deep night of land and man, the singers saw visions; grief, like a tuning fork, gave the tone, and the Sorrow Songs were uttered...
Almost as amoral as zoo exhibits, they struggle feebly against temptation, maunder miserably into a plot to murder the man who stands in their way. They attempt their clumsy bathtub murder, bring off an equally clumsy auto murder, face sure conviction, and are rescued in one of the most reptilian bits of legal chicanery that ever made fiction look almost as strange as truth. They are hounded by blackmailers; they are tortured still more severely by their inability to trust each other; they come at last to a surprise ending which, in the novel, had much the force...
...exclusively male community seems to lack emotional drive and spontaneity." Prisoners are always hungry: there is never enough to eat, although light diet makes for fitness, up to a point. Red Cross parcels are lifesavers but monotonous. The total lack of privacy makes a man develop "a kind of reptilian insensitiveness-like crocodiles in their tank at the Zoo, which walk over each other without either appearing to notice the other...