Word: twisting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ostensibly, the girls are pitiable embodiments of evil-monsters created by callousness, oppression, and the unnatural conditions of servitude. But Director Nico Papatakis and Scenarist Jean Vauthier twist this black theme into a cinema of absurdity that falls somewhere between the Marx Brothers and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In its liveliest moments, Les Abysses is unwittingly hilarious, an amateur Grand Guignol about a pair of sleazy, sullen chambermaids running amuck in Bedlam. When they are not dancing or screaming, they stab the furniture with hatpins, chip the plaster, bring in termites, pulverize the best china, wallop their mistress...
...Pumpkin Eater of the nursery thyme put his wife in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well. Giving a wry contemporary twist to Mother Goose, Penelope Mortimer's vivid first-person novel suggests that the poor creature then swiftly developed shell shock. In this slow, strong, incisive film version of the book, the ironing out of a well-kept wife's unkempt psyche is portrayed with harrowing perception by Anne Bancroft...
Divinity as Beauty. Lips lift in a sublime smile, torsos twist into reverse curves that enliven flesh, and ornament clings to smoothly modeled skin like a caress of art given to nature. Beauty was a reflection of divinity, just as the slender saints that adorn Chartres cathedral are the disembodied spirits of medieval Christianity...
...77th. Bury is a Paris-based Belgian who seems to be catching on everywhere. He was a hit in Venice, and U.S. museums were snatching up his work before this first New York show even opened. It consists of electrically animated nails, sticks, balls and tiny nylon wires that twist, tangle and topple, clutch and clash, then move smoothly together again, always with a sly, sensuous suggestion of human activity. Through...
...this neatly contrived suspense drama, all the surprises happen right on schedule. Some are effective, though, such as when Gina shuffles a corpse from a yacht to a Rolls-Royce to a country house. She faces each plot twist with swish and crackle, and is about to collect the millions when-but never mind. The real mystery is that anyone would pin a title like Woman of Straw on a movie starring Lollobrigida...