Word: wilder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film noir, as the optimistic excitement of wartime Hollywood gave way to a bleak mood of disillusionment and introspection. Directors turned away from the mythology of the American Dream to examine the darker sides of the American psyche: corruption, jealousy, greed, obsessive hate, and murder became crucial themes. Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, showing in the Orson Welles's film noir festival is in many ways a perfect example of the genre. Written by Raymond Chandler, it stars Barbara Stanwyck as the sexy but neglected housewife who seduces an insurance salesman into helping her murder her husband to collect...
...patients in the ward, says Heymann, sat "sunk in listless dejection" or "crawled about on their knees or stood on chairs and howled." Eventually transferred to a section for the less disturbed, Pound was allowed to see visitors for two hours a day. They came by the score: Thornton Wilder, Robert Lowell, Katherine Ann Porter, Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot. During the last eleven years of Pound's commitment, America's most illustrious literary salon was conducted in a madhouse...
Both Fists. Everything goes pretty much that way. Kahn contributes an other wonderful impersonation of a sex tease with a weird combination of airiness and the pouts. Within that well-formed woman lurks the soul of a perpetual adolescent. Wilder's high moment comes during an interview with the Foreign Secretary. There is, you see, this tempting box of chocolates, and His Lordship catches Sigi with not a finger in them but both fists deeply, gloriously into the goodies...
...could wish for a little more narrative drive in the proceedings, a little more invention and tension. Still, Wilder's film would probably be a worthwhile addition to the CIA's indoctrination program-reminding recruits that espionage is essentially the stuff of childish fantasy, therefore dangerous for grown men to take too seriously. As for the rest of us, the movie is probably the fastest escape from the holiday blahs that Hollywood is offering this season...
...Wilder's invention, Sigi should not be confused with Sherlock's older brother Mycroft, who was a lazy mathematical genius...