Word: distraught
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This sort of journey-through-society script might have led to a movie that really moved with the erratic spontaneity of street life. But The Bicycle Thief is oddly static. Events move predictably and almost mechanically. Each small experience of the distraught hero is meticulously rounded and forced in sentiment, character coloring and social comment.Even the minor movements of the actors-the boy's tumble on a rainy street, the mother's fingering of her cheek-appear overrehearsed...
...able to observe and meditate. Let us overcome our disgust; let us turn over the unclean refuse with our foot. What a swarming there is beneath it, what a tumult of busy workers! The Silphae,* with wing cases wide and dark, as though in mourning, flee distraught, hiding in the cracks in the soil; the Saprini,* of polished ebony which mirrors the sunlight, jog hastily off, deserting their workshop; the Dermestes,* of whom one wears a fawn-colored tippet flecked with white, seek to fly away, but, tipsy with the putrid nectar, tumble over and reveal the immaculate whiteness...
...Victory sign. Italians and Spaniards, who used the same two fingers to represent the horns of the devil, pointed them downward when they wanted to keep the devil in Hell, pointed them upward in the Churchillian manner when they wanted evil to triumph. Reminded of this fact by a distraught Cornish woman, undistraught Mr. Churchill went right ahead giving his sign...
...little over half way through this Universal Production, James Stewart and Eddie Albert crash their cargo plane in a southwestern wilderness. While Joan Fontaine consoles a distraught monkey in one end of the plane and an escaped embezzler lies petrified in the other, Albert informs Stewart, "You don't look very happy." Stewart and the Astor audience, had nothing to be happy about at that point or at any other in the movie...
...individuals, the last trace of doubt about the nature of the enemy had disappeared. In Czechoslovakia, Jan Masaryk jumped to his death, the tragic figure of thousands of men of good will who stubbornly held to the theory that the liberal can work with the Communist. In Manhattan, a distraught Russian schoolteacher leaped from an upper window in the Soviet consulate to escape return to Russia. More than speeches, reports or eyewitness accounts of life under Communism, her act nakedly revealed the bitter despair behind the glowing promises in Communism's workers' paradise...