Word: turgid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Jeanne Moreau. And except for some wonderfully grey and wintry views of Venice, this long, turgid melodrama has little else to recommend it. Made in Italy in 1962 by Director Joseph Losey (The Servant), Eva describes how a malicious, luxury-class harlot (Moreau) coolly destroys a famous Welsh author (Stanley Baker) who never amounted to much in the first place. The man is a loser whose reputation rests on a novel he stole from his dead brother. By the time the woman finishes with him, his exquisite wife (Virna Lisi) has committed suicide and the writer is reduced to loud...
...they travel toward California he slowly loses her, in muddled, morbid imaginings, to "a hardfaced fellow with protuberant eyes" sitting across the aisle. Metaphors incubate by the dozen in Teter's fecund prose, sometimes overgrowing it altogether. But Teter's style is more inventive and exuberant than turgid. For instance: "If the bus weren't mounting she'd drop on the floor, restribute burst like a sack of seeds, sprout into wakefulness...
...perhaps at his most turgid and absurd in the long, confused eulogy of Jean Genet's scabrous Our Lady of the Flowers; Sartre described the book as an epic of masturbation, and Genet described Sartre in some of his favorite four-letter words. But Sartre has lately found a fresher vein; in his autobiographical The Words (TIME, Oct. 9) he reminisces simply and compellingly about his unhappy childhood, from which he eventually escaped into literature as others escape into religion, business, or the Foreign Legion...
...meant to be everyman and everywoman, and life is the hellhole they are in. But the metaphor is grand, the allegory clothes the powerful narrative as patterns clothe a python. In his second film, a 37-year-old Japanese painter named Hiroshi Tesh-igahara has transformed a tricky-turgid novel into a luminous and violent existential thriller, an Oriental Pilgrim's Progress...
...years since Sartre wrote his taut and masterful early dramas, his works have become increasingly lengthy, turgid, posturing and difficult. The climax was perhaps Saint Genet, where he tortured a simple preface to another man's work into a labored and debatable treatise of 578 pages-three-quarters the length of the volumes he was introducing. But in his autobiography, Sartre simplifies and shortens. The writing is austere, crisp, even epigrammatic. The result is a warm, albeit desperately sad, account of his childhood and early teens. And far more than most autobiographies, this is an inward-turning book, cutting...