Word: themes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...second feature, "Man Hunt," with William Gargan and Marguerite Churchill, is amusing enough, plays new variations on the theme of the small-town reporter and the not-too-inhuman gangster. The bill is more than satisfactory for that reading period pressure on the head. Sharp eyes may notice that the bank set in the first film serves as the sherifi's office in the second...
...Theme of Education Before Verdun is stated on p. 323: "In the middle of a war, when civilization had long since collapsed . . , mankind, tenacious and defiant in the face of gross injustice, fought desperately against outrages that would indeed have cried aloud to heaven in peace, but might now rank as trifling irregularities." As in so many contemporary German novels, Injustice is the theme. The story opens with a minor but significant example. Bertin, who in peacetime had been a well-known German novelist, is now simply a near-sighted private in the Army Service Corps, gets into serious...
Background rather than theme, incidents rather than story, are the memorable notes in Education Before Verdun. As in Sergeant Grischa, the War is not the subject but the setting-with the difference that here the setting overlooms the human figures struggling in brief silhouet before its curtain. Fortress-girt Verdun, innermost circle of the Western Front's hell; where in 1916 the French and Germans each lost 350,000 men; where, between February and July, 23 million shells punctuated the deadlocked argument; Douaumont, captured and recaptured but each time by an accident, the death trap where an explosion wiped...
Very similar in theme to "The Virgin and the Gypsy," "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and other of D. H. Lawrence's explorations into the libido, "Ecstasy" tells the story of a beautiful young girl in search of an outlet for her emotional cravings. In no sense obscene or pornographic, if treats this study with the frank and simple directness which seems to be anathema to a section of the American mind. Unlike certain of the contemporary dramatists who seem to find frankness synonymous with sordidness it tells its elemental tale with scenic beauty and dramatic vigor. For treatment of such...
...Ecstasy" is not an exciting film, but it is a direct and frequently skillful treatment of a theme which is rarely allowed to occupy the place which it deserves in traumatic expression...