Word: sadism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...piece of showmanship it smacks of the bull-ring or the bear-pit. One can imagine the ferocious sadism of the crowd as they follow the intellectual downfall of the student under examination before the rapid-fire of this depraved department. Indeed, one might believe that this extraordinary innovation is an attempt on the part of the new regime to bolster the shrinking violets among the faculty. Such petty inferiority complexes must be replaced with true professorial pomposity: therefore exercises in exhibitionism, platform methods, lecture room ballyhoo...
Director Rouben Mamoulian added to the story a few Freudian touches. He made Hyde an incarnation of primitive sadism rather than a London bogeyman who was bad without good reason. Fredric March, ably assisted by Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart, is magnificent as Hyde, and he gives Jekyll a stilted Victorian elegance which, being a little false, makes Hyde's existence seem more credible. Good shot: Jekyll turning into Hyde as he watches a cat stalk a sparrow...
...bulls, or dicks disguised as guests, or newspaper reporters who turn out to be neither. Incidentally the reporters ought to be pleased by this little play; the police should not; and this, no doubt, is all to the good. There is one of those pleasing scenes of official sadism, inseparable from any piece dealing with the gentlemen in blue which usually sends the audience off into spasms of thrilled delight, and this particular reviewer into those of profound disgust...
...Friendship Society was involved in a sordid, hideous mess. In a shallow grave beside a garage in Clarksburg, W. Va., were found the bodies of two women and three children. In Clarksburg jail cowered a fat, beady-eyed, flabby little man, battered and bruised into a confession of his sadism. Police in many States followed clues to other crimes, other murders, all linked to Clarks burg's "Bluebeard" and the matrimonial societies through which he operated. From his papers it was apparent he had conducted at least 115 mail-order "court ships" with lonely, foolish women. Relatives of Widow...
...cosmopolitan and perverse Berlin, Sadism and kindred anomalies are well known and understood. The Sadist is recognized as an individual who commits acts of cruelty upon animals or humans not in a spirit of simple violence but because he derives from them complex sexual satisfaction. As every Berlin detective knows, Sadism takes its name from a Frenchman born in the reign of dissolute Louis XV, famed Donatien Alphonse François Comte ("Marquis") de Sade, whose incredibly voluminous and wearisomely detailed writings glorify "the philosophy of cruelty for its own sake" much as Christian writers exalt Divine Love...