Word: woman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...James Stewart) she sets out to enchant. The part is almost perfectly written for Actress Novak. The script quickly announces that as a witch she is not supposed to blush, cry, or indeed have very much expression at all. But when the heroine suddenly changes into a woman in love, Kim's expression changes so little that the spectator may find himself wondering which was witch. And Actor Stewart seems to be overwhelmed by Actress Novak's example. As the bewitched hero, he stumbles around most of the time with a vaguely blissful expression-rather like a comic...
...radiance of revelation, he still achieves more than most moderns can even hint at. His best lines have the directness of that other master of obscure simplicities, William Blake. Of hope: "My gates are all caves." Of love: "The pure admire the pure, and live alone; I love a woman with an empty face." Of the clear judgments of childhood...
...strongly moving. The sacrifice of self for the sake of others is surely one of the profoundest experiences that human beings have attained, and it is not often that this experience has been so sharply dramatized as it is in the life of Gladys Aylward. Something of the woman's flame-simple, stone-actual spirit is unquestionably preserved in the film, but all too often the religious force of her example is prettily dissipated in the delusive grandeurs of the wide screen, and safely explained away in entertainingly heroic tropes and grossly commercial moments of the heart...
MARLBOROUGH'S DUCHESS, by Louis Kronenberger. A topnotch biography, continuously rich with the shine of a fabulous period, provides a full-dress portrait of an 18th century woman whom no one could underestimate until she overrated herself...
MISTRESS TO AN AGE, by J. Christopher Herold. Germaine de Staël back again in a first-rate biography of the woman who rode the French Revolution like a balky horse, managed, without beauty or other feminine graces, to capture as lovers many of the foremost men of her day. Napoleon said no, and that may have been his major mistake...