Word: sadisms
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...parody of Freudian criticism (scholars have wrangled for decades about whether the ghosts of Quint and Jessel are merely figments of the new governess's sexually starved imagination). Director-Producer Michael Winner, however, tries for a pretentious shocker in fancy dress. He serves up a pastiche of sexual sadism, witchcraft (two dolls are burned in chamber pots) and a pair of Quintessential messages: love and hate are synonymous; the dead just hang around wherever they are killed...
...screamed a National Enquirer front-page headline in 1962. I CUT OUT HER HEART AND STOMPED ON IT W35 another terrifying teaser in the weekly tabloid's gory old days. The paper's new day is something else. In a total turnabout, the Enquirer has banished cannibalism, sadism and sick sex in favor of a blend of upbeat success stories, gossip by and about celebrities, plus an overdose of the occult and the quasiscientific. The switch to a kind of respectability has had spectacular results. Circulation, stalled at about 1,000,000 at the height of the Enquirer...
Times must be hard for the enemies of capitalist decadence; Russia's Literaturnaya Gazeta has laid down a heavy ideological barrage against Film Director Alfred Hitchcock, accusing him of "antihumanistic attitude toward art" and "psychological sadism." But as so often happens, a Communist putdown is a bourgeois blurb. "Millions of his spectators," says the Gazeta, "take Hitchcock's sinister feelings seriously and sigh with relief when the dark in the movie house is dispelled and the lights come on again...
Ultimately The Cowboys suggests that you are not a man until you have murdered. These children dispatch Dern in an act of outright sadism all the more chilling for its apparent dispassion. Yet Rydell and the screenwriters seem to be congratulating them on their new-found machismo. The Cowboys is no investigation of the inherent evil of the young, like Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica. Nor does it have the awful irony of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (TIME, Dec. 20), in which heroism turned into savagery. Here savagery is seen as heroism...
...savagery and vitality of Brazil's past, its "sadism and felicity," become a musky essence that pervades Bodard's writing, even when he deals with the present. People whom he meets or hears about in his travels deserve books of their own. There are the Vilas Boas brothers, Orlando and Claudio, who have dedicated themselves to saving the Indians. Orlando is burly, harsh and volatile. Claudio, idealistic and introverted, is so lost in an irreconcilable vision of the noble savage, the savagery of ignoble civilization, that he periodically retreats further into the jungle to read philosophy...