Word: scent
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Only the "savages." the forest Indians, remained human. Fawcett came to love their primeval sweetness and wisdom. They track their game by scent. Fawcett recorded, as an animal does, and call it to be killed with strange, alluring cries that the creature cannot resist. They fish by lacing the water with a caustic sap called solimán, that stuns the fish but does not poison their flesh. Fawcett also solemnly accepted the story that the Indians know of a plant whose juices dissolve metal, and even make stone soft and workable...
...common are a supernatural fizz and heavy-handed direction. Director Julien Duvivier (Un Carnet du Bal, Tales of Manhattan) pioneered the splicing art, but he keeps fantasy firmly earthbound in this 1943 effort. Granted, the writing is usually abominable ("Remember the boatman's song at twilight at Amalfi, the scent of orange blossoms on the road to Damascus," etc., etc.), but the absence of a light touch accentuates triteness and makes the melodrama ludicrous. Although Robert Benchley amusingly bridges the three tales, Duvivier seems to take the stories themselves far too seriously. In fact, you can never be quite sure...
There were four of them in the mental ward. Old Max would imagine that he smelled the scent of pines, and he wouldbe back on Hill 299, fighting the Boche. Coselli listened to the charge of wild horses in his head. Bébert, a veteran of the Spanish civil war, kept hearing the laughter of the dead. The fourth patient, "the Druid," constantly saw beside him him the head of Christ, crowned with thorns and bleeding...
...they surrender to their manias, "one barking, the other whinnying, one a dog, the other a horse." And the wild, rhetorical prayer that Bébert casts up in his misery also speaks for Novelist Molaine: "Father here we are in the ooze, inert as fishes spawning. Our souls scent the mud, and our eyes are gradualIy closing to the light from the bank . . . Lighten us and regenerate us in the depths where we lie. Save us from darkness and the plague. Let us be filled with that better life towards which we yearn with palpitating gills . . . And take pity...
...body lay in the glare of spotlights, the huge grey head resting on a silken pillow, the chest of his simple, military tunic adazzle with medals and ribbons; others glinted on a pillow laid at the foot of his bier. Through the great hall floated the sickish scent of massed flowers, from Peking and all the conquered capitals of Eastern Europe, from Communist Parties all over, from Stalingrad and Stalino and Stalinabad and Stalinogrosk...