Word: surrealism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...script calls for dusk at this point, and Ben Edwards provides splendidly perceptible and atmospheric gloom to emphasize the foreboding mood. But the almost surreal quality of this passage, its combination of mystery and sublimity that survives the most dreary Shavian bathos when read with half an ear and half a soul, is turned by its current interpreters into a distracted pandering for tepid chuckles. Mr. Clurman has caused the weird chant to be accompanied by a jolly jig, and Maurice Evans delivers Shotover's curtain line with a phlegmy ingratiation that completely drains it of grandeur...
...surreal ravings still tell a real story -of a young university graduate educated beyond his background through the goodness of the welfare state, frustrated in a nation living in twilight, a second-class citizen in a society where the first-class citizens "spend their time mostly looking forward to the past." He has captured his wife Alison (Mary Ure) from the enemy above. With her and his business partner (excellently played by Gary Raymond), he lives in an attic in a Midlands town so bleak that it seems to smell of soft coal and leftover herring. There, University Man Porter...
...poignant little saga of puppy love quickly brought to an end by the boy's tutor. Nabokov's Dozen lacks Lolita's pun-prone pyrotechnics. But it shares with it Nabokov's fascinating gift for translating the machine-tooled commonplaces of U.S. life into a surreal landscape of fantasy, a kind of Poe-like, gadget-haunted region of Weir. Thus a soda-fountain stool violently revolves into a "tall mushroom," a newly screwed-in electric bulb lights up with "the hideous instancy of a dragon's egg hatching in one's bare hand...
Couple One is a somewhat surreal composition: an oversexed grease monkey (Cameron Mitchell) married to what he calls, when he's sore at her, "common Tennessee dirt" (Joanne Woodward). The girl looks like a chippy, and she can drink like a French drain when she's a mind to, but all she really wants is Social Acceptance and A Baby of Her Own. He, on the other hand, is strictly a smalltime sadist whose idea of fun is to kill Japs, and whose ambition is to be the local chief of police...
...perpetual nightmare of the war and hoping in his "state of damnation ... to reveal the truth about this desolate world." Rarer than the power to shock is Author Gascar's power to evoke disgust, which he does by combining familiar objects in unfamiliar ways until they become surreal and emetic. In Gaston he describes a rat: "It looked rather like a great hairy carrot; it crouched there as all rats do, as soon as dusk has fallen and there is nothing to distinguish them from a lost slipper or a forgotten rag except that long worm lying along...