Word: sexe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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French intellectuals are appalled at the "bourgeois barbarism" that relegates U.S. intellectuals to the status of "eggheads." After a shuddering visit to the U.S., Simone (The Second Sex) de Beauvoir, complained: "The U.S. is hard on intellectuals. Publishers, managers evaluate your brains with a critical and disgusted air, like an impresario asking a dancer to show her legs...
...Curtiz seems unable to decide whether he is reading from a fairy tale or a police blotter. Sometimes the archness is laid on with a trowel, sometimes the trifling action stops dead for overdetailed explanations. Bogart plays his role pretty straight; Aldo Ray is disconcertingly elfin for an alleged sex fiend; and Ustinov's mugging seems overdone. Basil Rathbone and John Baer wander onscreen long enough to look properly villainous. Joan Bennett and Gloria Talbott add their pretty confusions to the artificial turmoil. Technicolor gives the picture a fairly handsome mounting, but nothing can rescue the story from...
...pinch of salt insofar as it pretends to historical accuracy. But he considers it a sound Egg in the mythical sense, in that it expresses the true and natural order of things. For like the Pelasgians and James Thurber, Poet Graves has no doubt that "woman [is] the dominant sex and man her frightened victim." If the world is in a mess today he says, it is because egoistical man dethroned the Eggoistical goddess and replaced her with grim-faced deities named Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah...
...anthropomorphic animals take charge: Jock the Scotty speaks with a burr; Trusty the bloodhound has a Southern accent; a dachshund talks like a comedy Dutchman; a borzoi spouts about Gorky with Russian flourishes. Whimsy is seldom more than a step ahead of whamsy: Jock and Trusty archly explain about sex to Lady just before Tramp does battle with three slavering mastiffs; a comic scene in the dog pound is closely followed by a parody of the "last mile" walk from the death house as a crazed dog is led off to be destroyed. The film's big terror scene...
...grandson Anthony Glyn (nom de plume for Sir Geoffrey Davson, Baronet) makes plain in his slightly pious but consistently entertaining biography, the woman behind the legend was no pan-therish love goddess but a proper Victorian who put little sex into her books and found no satisfying love in her life...