Word: somnambulist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Whims of Cupid was already over and the second presentation Somnambulist was in process. The dancers who swept before the footlights with such grace plunged towards us with great sighs, wiping their brows as they came...
Jazzman Sidney Bechet soloes in his own Ballet, which has been a success in France. The story concerns a somnambulist who kills his family while he is asleep, only to be led to his own death by a slave. The music at first alternates between late romantic and jazz styles, then combines the two. The jazz is excellent, while the classical sections are rather dramatic. When combined, Bechet has an interesting musical admixture that fits the weird story...
...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...