Word: satanic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nearby Byrant Pond, came home from the school and complained to her parents of "vulgar" content in her assigned reading. The minister and his wife sampled parts of the three novels and said they "were shocked." The Rev. Hanson branded the books as part of a "worldwide plot by Satan to teach young people to laugh at God," and resolved forthwith to get them removed from the school curriculum." I oppose their use on the grounds that they convey the idea that everyone lives like it says in the books," he stated ungrammatically, "and that teachers and churches approve that...
...RARELY sees completely integrated films, works whose every element contributes to a single expression. Few directors reach the maturity and control necessary to such a work. Sorrows of Satan (1927) finds Griffith once more transcending himself, leaving behind the formal means by which he ordered his earlier dramas for a simpler, more direct style. Sorrows is so unified that its mood and meaning can be assigned to no single aspect of that style...
...every turn and nuance is heightened, given immediate meaning for the character involved, as much by its understated acting as by its simple shooting style. Carol Dempster has come far from the frolics she and Lillian Gish gave Griffith's films of the earlier twenties. And Adolphe Menjou, as Satan, is the model of restraint. For him a grimace or devilish leer would be an unspeakable faux pas. But Griffith, far from leaving him a polished gentleman without depth of character, makes his slightest gestures personally significant. Menjou is eating dinner with Ricardo Cortez in the grandest of opulent restaurants...
...such terror we recognize the power of each simple detail, the seriousness of all the beautiful things happening before our eyes. Sorrows is no sweet moralistic drama. The moral unity it maintains is the most complex of artistic attitudes. Satan, for example, is no villain. Indeed, Griffith discarded villains after America (1924). The men who rob the hero and heroine of Isn't Life Wonderful are driven to their crime by hunger and, like the two leads, by marital love. They are as human, as noble, as anyone else. Satan goes through more intense emotional crises even than the deserted...
...complexity of Sorrows' sustained mood and action seems at first to be betrayed by its ending. Cortez, pursued by the shadow of Satan, flees to his true love. One thinks this is a cheap trick to get them back together and achieve a happy ending. It substitutes the crudest of cardboard religious symbolism for serious moral change. But the really cheap ending would have had Cortez repent and return of his own will. Force is required to return this malcontent to the women who loves...