Word: womans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week, in the opulent gloom of movie theaters in Manhattan and Chicago, the lovely woman screamed & screamed. For a moment, the scene looked exactly like the old-fashioned thrill shot that moviemakers call a "cliff-hanger." But what moviegoers were actually getting was a breathtaking glimpse of an abyss in the infinite mountains of the mind...
...disembodied voice asks her where she is. She does not know. The camera, following her inside a hulking grey building, discovers (as if through her bewildered eyes) the locked doors, the prison bars, the caged human figures. Casually it takes in such alarming details as a woman giggling to herself, another sitting on the floor. Later, it surveys the rows of beds in the dormitory at night, when Virginia first realizes where she is, while the soundtrack weaves a chilling pattern of the weeping, moaning and plaintive singing that come from the separate nightmares...
...there (as some adults speak in front of children); the strange snobbery of the sick who look down on their sicker fellows; the large-looming small idiocies of institutional bureaucracy, such as the clean carpet in one ward which must not be stepped on (and the wonderful old woman who jumps on it and dances a defiant Charleston...
...finest, based mostly on Litvak's observations in the asylums he visited, is laid in the "disturbed" ward. There, amid the weirdly unrestrained babble, the camera makes its way from figure to figure: the girl who slinkily dances about in a pathetic imitation of an evening gown, the woman crouched praying on the floor, the girl with the Ana Pauker haircut pleading "in the name of the Party" that she is not insane. Then, approximating Virginia Cunningham's own sudden detachment, the camera pulls back & up, gathering the diverse figures in a kind of ballet; pulling higher & higher...
...Woman's Touch. In Memphis, Orville Bond complained that his housemaid had filled all his 30 pipes with a sweet-smelling deodorant...