Word: shocker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...General Arlen Specter, 35, a liberal Democrat turned liberal Republican, who also happens to be running for election as Philadelphia's district attorney against Incumbent James C. Crumlish Jr. Predictably, Democrat Crumlish blasted Specter's report as purely political. All the same, it was a well-documented shocker-the work of 27 state investigators who toiled for ten months at the request of Attorney General Walter E. Alessandroni...
Actually, the book is a Moravia-type shocker telling of impaled babies, little girls six and eight years old sold to brothels, and quarterings by the thousands. The purpose of all this gore is to prove that the suffering and horror wrought upon China by the West forced the Chinese to go Communist in self-defense. Author Suyin lets her morbid imagination gallop away when she writes of such events as the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 by Japan and the Western powers: "Soldiers of France and England and Germany went about with open trousers to rape women...
...jailer with a shovel one dismal English night, a bid for freedom that ends as a muddy, bloody wrestling match. Though Author Fowles's harrowing final chapters are only capsuled on film, The Collector, even with its intelligence and insight curtailed, still pays off handsomely as a shocker sure to quicken the pulse of any anxious working girl who has to walk home unescorted...
Unfortunately, all of Murder's devices prove to be just about as hopelessly primitive as that. The dialogue offers a redoubtable challenge to actors required to speak it with straight faces. They get scant help from Director George Englund, who apparently felt stymied by a shocker in which the only new gimmick is the discovery of the wheel...
Perhaps the most admirable thing about the production is that director Richard Blau and his cast have faced all the problems of the play directly. Blau might easily have turned the play into a shocker, or a melodrama, but he has aimed instead for simplicity, letting the plot do the work...