Word: sordidly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Behind this sordid record lies the soul of a romantic. On his left arm Marks wears a tattooed double heart inscribed "Love, Nellie." On his right is an eight-inch snake coiled about a dagger stuck through the top of a skull and bearing Marks's motto, which happens to be "Death Before Dishonor...
Between these points, her life has its tough spots--as has the film--but it is a relentless series of misfortunes. Director Rene Clement and his star, Maria Schell, have played this exhausting saga for every sob, every simper and every sordid detail. They have come with up an absorbing, at times sickening, film, but one which never reaches its goal of tragedy and which is more depressing than it is genuinely moving...
With hamhanded touches of horror like these, M. Clement destroys the tragedy and poignancy of his situation. Gervaise is a fine, very nearly moving, motion picture; if you can stomach (and forget) the sordid detail, it is a worthwhile experience...
...Ariadne de Lago (Geraldine Page). The ineffectual young man, Chance Wayne (Paul Newman), is a sexual athlete, but an impotent failure as the actor he wants to be. The has-been and the would-be smoke hashish ("Moroccan, and the finest") and saunter to the footlights to tell their sordid life stories in monologue...
...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...