Word: sadistical
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...arrested on suspicion of having murdered him, the account of her trial would certainly be front-paged. It would give the Press hysterics if: 1) her defense counsel, the greatest criminal lawyer of his day, were to become desperately enamoured of her; 2) the presiding judge were a sadist and notorious lecher...
...picture would have been much better if it had been more explicit about how its most interesting personage reaches this sad predicament. A plot which is more of an insinuation than a narrative implies that the soul of Bavian's dead mistress, a lady sadist executed for strangling three of her lovers, comes back to inhabit temporarily the body of a pure young heiress (Carole Lombard) who consults Bavian to get news of her dead twin brother. The heiress faints during a seance; when she wakes up, her eyes have a fiendish glitter. She entices Bavian aboard her yacht...
...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...
Seemingly the Berlin detectives worked on the theory that a genuine Sadist in the audience would react with pleasure if not glee, while everyone else would be revolted or would scream or faint, as many did last week. Results from this strenuous method of crime detection were said to be "promising," and several arrests were made, though no one was actually charged with being a Crime Clubber last week...
...fixed rules," they are well camouflaged in a medley of deliriously discordant, rarely harmonious, characters-famous Artist Bidlake whose voluptuous youth has reluctantly passed into caustic Rabelaisian senility; his writer-son who flings aside a reproachful mistress for the wanton daughter of a musty scientist; a suave sadist who bullies, tortures, kills, for the sheer thrill of it; an editor-publisher, bitterly caricatured, who fleeces his authors, but shows his mistress an almost inhuman tenderness; a conversational philosopher who is said to be the author's particular mouthpiece. As such, he is a brilliantly garrulous person, for Huxley fairly...