Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...beat disciplinarian who runs New York's 23,600-man force with an iron hand (TIME, July 7), promoted eight cops ranging from rookie patrolman to lieutenant. Curiously, all eight were raised for the same reason: they had put the finger on other cops during a month of sordid police scandals that rocked the world's largest city...
...wonder of this sordid and symbolic tale is that it is suffused with compassion, heightened by the remarkable music Alban Berg wrote for it. The score, set in the tilted frame of nontonality, is carefully cast in a variety of classical musical forms: suite, passacaglia, sonata, fanatasie and fugue; scherzo, etc. The huge (113 instruments) orchestra sometimes bellows in brassy rages, sometimes shrieks in lines of shrill angularity, sometimes surprises with passages of softly breathing lyricism. The stark horror of the murder is conveyed in a howling, brassy crescendo in the orchestra that gives way abruptly to the tinselly tinkle...
...Stepfather (Mr. Reinhardt) and Stepdaughter (Miss Landey) spend a good deal of time standing around chewing the fat about this scene before they ever get to playing it. Perhaps because every aspect of the plight of the Characters is so elaborately discussed, they seem not so much melodramatic as sordid--in spite of a haunting, Flying Dutchman quality in their eternal fixedness in agony. For good stretches of the long first act, before sordidity passes into ghastliness and thus takes on some interest, the effect is almost numbing...
Many businessmen felt that Murrow had smeared them through "guilt by association." That call girls are sometimes used by business was scarcely news. But, said the New York World-Telegram and Sun: "We just don't believe this sordid business exists on anything like the scale Murrow suggests . . . Cops and other authorities are openly skeptical that many businesses routinely debauch their customers...
...this, as in the other three stories (also about waifs and strays), Author Capote has retained sentiment without permitting himself schmalz, achieved pity without falling into self-pity. Over whatever is sordid falls his crisp, clean prose. At the end of Breakfast, Holly's whereabouts are unknown and she may even be dead and "travelin' through the pastures of the sky." But her fate is really written in her dialogue. Bad little good girls like Holly Golightly never die; they go to Broadway, where Julie Harris plays them...