Word: somnambulist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...this slate-smooth hide & seek, there is so much daydreamy standing around that everyone seems to get captured at least twice. Under George Sherman's direction, the picture moves with somnambulist deliberateness and Dana Andrews continues his ponderous new style of acting like a mutinous galley slave. The other principals behave in harrowing situations like mechanical toys that need winding. A new actor, Jeff Chandler, registers a slow magnetic power similar to Gregory Peck's, and is apt to become at least half as popular. Stephen McNally, oddly the only one in the movie who tries...
...pieces where Gisevius drops them and reconstructs a Wagnerian drama of the suicide "love death" of Hitler and Eva Braun. His evidence, gathered from documents and survivors, is circumstantial but pretty convincing. From the Führer-bunker, deep under the Reich Chancellery garden, the war "was directed by somnambulist decisions," he says. Russian shells crashed down overhead; Berlin was almost surrounded; in G.I. slang, the doomed party leaders were getting "bunker happy." Hitler himself deteriorated rapidly...
...Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was originally, a weird, ferocious melodrama about a power-mad hypnotist (Werner Krauss) and his tool, a murderous somnambulist (Conrad Veidt). It was intended as an attack on authoritarianism. But the director cooked up a story "frame" (i.e., he had the main story told by an asylum inmate) which made the heroes (and the authors) seem mad. Authority emerged as a benign force, and the whole point of the original story was sidetracked. The popular device of the "framing story," Dr. Kracauer explains, shows the German mind introversively withdrawing into a shell...
...world Joyce wrote about was, on the surface, the city of Dublin, where he had lived until, at 22, he forsook Ireland for lifelong expatriation on the Continent. His endless evocation of Dublin and the inner life of its people, pathetic, somnambulist, comic and dirty, was as factual as a photograph and as symbolic as a liturgy. Even sympathetic critics sometimes lost patience with him. Wrote Cyril Connolly...
Papa's Boys by Day. Says Colonel Sandier: "The personality structure of the somnambulist is that of the overprotected, babied adult. . . . Somnambulism, in its essence, represents to the sleepwalker an attempt to escape from threatening dangers...