Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, the film seems to use these more than sordid elements, not because it has a point of view, even a negativistic one, but because sex and brutality are shortcuts to suspense and audience attention. The proof of this lack of unity and pointfulness is that the aforementioned seduction scene is the climax of the film, after which it anti-climatically and ridiculously gurgles along and finally stops...
Scramble for the Dollar. In sordid fact, according to Coulter, the average American is "up to his ears in debt," trades jobs "constantly in a frantic scramble for the extra dollar," and by all odds will wind up in jail, divorce court or the psychiatrist's clutches. "Every third or fourth person you meet," said Coulter, "is having psychiatric treatment. Each big apartment building has at least one resident psychiatrist, and some have four or five. It is the boomingest profession in town...
...Williams' attempt at a kind of outer and inner story-in his ferocious portrayal of a whole community's lynch-law intolerances that encircles his sordid, tense, sometimes maudlin idyl-there is more awry than a certain sprawl and shifting of tone. There is a real lack of causation and of vital connection; the destructive social forces never bear down honestly or even credibly on the personal tale. But here it is the social critic who helps lead the craftsman astray-the Williams who is obsessed with violence, corruption and sex, who sees life through a cracked glass...
...Proud and the Beautiful is a daring and skillfully-wrought film. Adapted from a film by John Paul Sartre and directed by Yves Allegret, it is genuinely real and honest, although at times this honesty devotes itself to exploring the sordid and the obscene as a short-cut to a powerful audience response and proving a point...
...past two weeks, we have seen the sordid climax of the long-term misuse of an undergraduate political organization. The type of election battle now being waged in the Harvard Young Republican Club is representative of the internal disorder and external uselessness that has typified the Club in the last few years...