Word: sordidly
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...King, 34, pitches his inhumane comedy on the rise and fall of a young Greek spiv of the postwar dead-beat generation. The book's larger theme is the old motif of American innocence v. European corruption. Reflected in the golden eye of a Mediterranean setting, what is sordid and depraved becomes corrosively hilarious. Spiro Polymerides is a sun-baked peasant Apollo. He is taken up by an arty, effeminate, high-minded official of a U.S. relief mission in Athens. To fiftyish Irvine Stroh, Spiro is a kind of male Liza Doolittle, whom he goes about refashioning...
Eight in a Bed. Dolci spared the reader no detail, however sordid, of life in Palermo's notorious Cascino Courtyard. There, 200 yards from the city's splendid cathedral, 260 families live in squalor in 210 rooms. Only one family has a toilet, he reported; the rest run the risk of being fined $4 for relieving themselves on nearby railroad tracks. To keep alive, boys resort to stealing, girls to prostitution. "We sleep four at the top of a bed and four at the bottom," said one inhabitant. "My uncle, my husband, my sister, myself and four children...
...might be pornographic. It is based on Emile Zola's early novel, Thérèse Raquin, a somber slice of life that was called pornographic as soon as it came out. Neither book nor movie is. Written with Naturalist Zola's unfailing passion for the sordid underside of reality, the book showed how illicit love led to murder, how murder turned love to hate, how hate led to plots of new murders, and how a couple of suicides ended the whole bloody business. The movie plucks the story from the hands of fate and throws...
...those who can savor the sensuous, the sensual and the unsavory all at once. The heroine is a sex-surfeited Jewess in Alexandria who does not understand herself, in or out of bed. The reward for the reader is an unforgettable impression of both the oddly exciting and sordid sides of a Near Eastern city...
Romance, therefore, stays in the cocktail lounge for the most part. Rather one sees sordid slums, drab barracks in the oil fields, or one senses an incipient brutality at times, and a certain fatalism in the people mixed with an unquenchable joie de vivre...