Word: sordidly
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Before Author Bowen has completed his depressing but real picture, Charles has tried to escape existence by suicide-and failed even at that. Julian goes off for a Mediterranean holiday with his father to think things out. but simply sinks deeper into sordid sexual adventure. Back home, he unintentionally causes his father's death, an event that leaves Mother lonely but the boys untouched. The colonel was as empty of purpose as the others, but at least he had housed his purposelessness in character. All the boys can agree to do is to "go on trying then...
...death of Rosie Nitribitt, a high-class floozy of Frankfurt who opened her door to dozens of West German millionaires but couldn't keep her mouth shut, and so one night was strangled with a pair of her own nylons (TIME, Sept. 29, 1958). The movie takes the sordid case as an occasion for social satire, as a chance to say, often in a deftly indirect and wickedly amusing way, that the "economic miracle" is a moral disaster...
...girl, by all odds the most fatal femme fatale in all opera, is the heroine of Alban Berg's Lulu. Left uncompleted at Composer Berg's death in 1935, Lulu has one of the most difficult scores (twelve-tone) and the most sordid libretto ever written. It is a kind of nightmarish perversion of fin de siècle German romanticism; its subject matter includes sadism, narcissism, incest, homosexuality, masochism and murder. Counting its Zurich premiere in 1937, it has been staged only six times. The Frankfurt Opera is now giving Lulu its seventh production, and probably...
...subsequent acts her painter-lover cuts his throat when he learns of Lulu's sordid past. Then an elderly lecher marries her; when he discovers her trysting with his son, he offers her a gun to commit suicide and is promptly shot dead himself. Lulu is smuggled out of prison by another of her lovers, Countess Geschwitz, who fools the authorities by changing clothes with Lulu and taking her place ("Now," muses the ungrateful Lulu, "the poor monster sits in prison instead of me"). Lulu decamps to Paris, philanders with gamblers, procurers and swindlers. The end comes...
...Congressman bothered to ask why Van Doren did not retire, or, if he wanted to be more polite about it, did not intentionally muff a question to get out of the isolation booth. Item: Van Doren testified that he was making a clean breast of the whole sordid story for the benefit of his "millions" of friends-and particularly one unnamed woman whose letter had moved him. In fact, he was cornered by a subpoena from a congressional committee. Furthermore, the evidence of fraud was overwhelming, and Van Doren had already admitted that he had perjured himself in his testimony...