Word: sordidness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...plot entangles the private and professional lives of seven women working at a place called Dreamland. Among them are Mickey, a gum-chewing spend-thrift running away from a sordid home, Yasumi, a loan shark who finally claws her way out of the business, and Yori, a weakling who despises prostitution but cannot stay away. Against a background of neon lights and haunting music, these women suffer, cheat, show flashes of compassion, and dream about escape. One who originally sold herself to support her son goes insane when the son renounces her. Another drives her tubercular husband to suicide...
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...