Word: svengalis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...affected a laugh so bloodcurdling that Actor Henry Irving imitated it for dramatic moments in Shakespeare's plays. He often signed his paintings with a butterfly armed with a scorpionlike tail. He inspired much of Trilby's demonic master villain, Svengali. His mistress-of-the-hour strutted nudely past his devout Episcopalian mother, neither one guessing that posterity would make James Abbott McNeill Whistler's mother the most renowned artist's model of all time...
...intensity, The Roof falls short of the best neorealistic films, but in technical skill and in the subtlety with which it makes its points it ranks among the finest. Director De Sica humanizes the harsh material of the story with his easy gaiety and gentle humor, masterfully plays the Svengali to his pickup cast of raw amateurs-whom he inspires not to act but to live out their feelings with an artless art. Essentially, Neorealists De Sica and Zavattini have not changed their cinematic method, but they seem to have revised their social and moral philosophy. In their earlier films...
...Svengali & Scandals. Yet, as Hawaii's economy grew, her political structure shook. The French and British poised time and again to annex the islands. (The British actually did, abortively, for five months in 1863, which accounts for the Union Jack influence in the island flag.) Desperately, Kamehameha III appealed to the U.S. for annexation as a state, but failed...
When King Kalakaua-the "Merry Monarch,'' elected by the legislature two years after the end of the Kamehameha dynasty-ratified a reciprocal trade treaty with the U.S. in 1875, Hawaii boomed in earnest. But then, embroiled with a corrupt legislature and a Svengali-like adventurer, Kalakaua lost his grip; scandals raged as the spendthrift King kicked the public debt from $388,000 to $2,600,000 until, in 1887, he was forced to sign a new constitution stripping himself of his near-totalitarian powers...
...showgirls had, Marilyn is alternately spirited and lethargic. Especially in her tussling with Olivier, she seems more directed by him than acting with him-as if by wiggling his off-camera ear he gives her the cue to giggle. Conversely, Olivier, almost embarrassed by being an on-camera Svengali. often appears to stoop gallantly to make his protégée as towering as he is. The highlights of any such Graustarkian foolishness usually, though strangely, come when Graustark momentarily seems real. Olivier does the trick, facing Marilyn's gee-whiz antics on their carriage-borne...