Word: vulgars
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...feature titled I Call First. Evocative of Marty, it cuts off a slice of life about an Italian-American bank teller who falls in love with a girl he meets on the Staten Island ferry, deserts her when he discovers that she was once raped, and returns to the vulgar bachelor world of his street-corner cronies. Flawed and immature in plot and structure, First nonetheless has an exact sense of the Lower Manhattan milieu and some authentic and hard-edged dialogue-but almost no commercial possibilities. Scorsese, who put up $6,000 of his own savings to direct...
...this movement afoot in the Christian society to abolish the expensive, massive and majestic cathedrals [Jan. 12]. In this day and age of constant stimuli, of incessant noise and overpopulation with pressing, vulgar crowds it is indeed unfortunate. Heretofore they represented one of the few remaining places where a man could go to think quietly, in relative safety-and be alone...
Contemporary critics kissed off Derby Day as vulgar and commonplace, but it offers today's viewers a rare opportunity to rub elbows with a red-blooded race of Britons sporting in a roseate world when the pound seemed forever sound. In addition, Frith's breezy freshness and mundane subject matter mark him as an artist who did more to announce Manet and Degas than either he or they would have been prepared to admit...
...give his slow story some contrapuntal rhythm and social significance, Lelouch cuts from shots of the triangle (filmed in Technicolor), to monochromatic scenes of conflict in Africa and Asia, presumably covered by the hero. The vulgar-cliche style of these sequences can only be described in Nabokov's term, "poshlost." The reporter self-righteously editorializes: "The Nazis tortured because of a guilty conscience from oppressing Europe during the war . . . In Viet Nam, the U.S. is in the same situation ..." Meanwhile the horrors of battle are shown in pictures as stilted as window displays, the blood stylistically spattered...
Poshlost, says he, means "corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature, these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know...