Word: violet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...confounding blur: Pretty Baby's narrative often seems to be languishing somewhere in the film's hazy background. That's a shame, because the screenplay is built around an exciting idea. Malle and Scenarist Polly Platt have hypothesized a romance-and eventual marriage-between Heroine Violet (Brooke Shields) and E.J. Bellocq (Keith Carradine), the legendary photographer of Storyville's glory days. This couple's bizarre March-December affair, like the equally promising relationship between Violet and her prostitute mother (Susan Sarandon), is described only intermittently. Instead of coming to terms with the characters' emotions...
...also, at least at twelve, a natural actress. It is chilling to watch her come on to Johns, aping the older whores' bedroom spiel in a mock-adult voice; her scenes with men are the movie's best. Though the film does not explicitly show Violet's bedroom activities, Shields is at times a sexual figure. A volatile mixture of both innocence and carnality, she makes the audience feel that anything can happen when she is around...
...precious little ever does take place. At the end of the film, Violet is leaving New Orleans to start a normal life; the movie closes with a freeze frame of her face while she waits for a train north. Malle apparently believes this closeup resolves his story: he wants to show that Violet has already started to harden into a dull, defeated adult. But one look at Shields' face and we see that Malle is wrong. The fascinating secrets of this girl's childhood still lurk in her wide blue eyes, waiting to be unlocked. Far from being...
...sieve made out of animal hair was allowed-the Celts might have devised it. But when John Rossetti made a chair, Percival destroyed it. Says he: "It was too early to have thought up such a thing." Martin Elphick, a doctor from Kent, pursued primitive medicine, treating flu with violet and willow bark, headaches with valerian root, and asthma with deadly nightshade. The Iron Agers developed their own dyes, appletree bark for yellow, the yew tree for orange, lichens for brown and green...
...altar tabernacle where consecrated bread is kept. On the cloth, in use for. 15 years, they now saw a pattern of shadows that seemed to them to resemble the face of Jesus. "We called some of our friends and told them they had to come immediately," recalls Housewife Violet Burrows. "We were afraid it would go away...