Word: myth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young Ben, Beau Bridges (son of Actor Lloyd Bridges) plays the hero with the numbstruck charm of a tarnished cherub. Ben believes totally in America's favorite myth: the up-from-nothing success story. So believing, he becomes living proof of that other American truism: there's a sucker born every minute. Ben runs away to Chicago, sin city, carnival to a million peculators in wheat, meat and railways. Pickpockets, exposure and starvation nearly do him in until the boy comes under the wing of a municipal madam named Queen Lil (Melina Mercouri). Lil's most valued...
Where does romanticism lead? In one of its incarnations, the romantic fascination with myth, tribe and race led, ultimately, to the barbarities of Hitler. If the "traditional checks on human nature should be removed," wrote Critic Irving Babbitt in his classic Rousseau and Romanticism, "what emerges in the real world is not the mythical will to brotherhood but the ego and its fundamental will to power." Yet romanticism also reconfirms the value of the individual. In many ways, the movement expands personal freedom, and the strength of liberal democracy owes a considerable debt to 19th century romantics, who championed civil...
...veneration of rationality was the special myth of modern man. The world view created by the enthronement of reason included a universal belief in individualism and competition; now that myth is dying. Faith in science and technology has given way to fear of their consequences; traditional institutions and even authority itself are distrusted and often detested. The cultural revolution of the '60s that emphasized Dionysian rather than Apollonian virtues will continue into...
Author Renault, whose specialty is Hellenic myth and culture, has written better disciplined, more absorbing books (The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die). Here she appears to be limited by her slightly blinkered view of Alexander. Granting him his historic virtues-precocity, courage, leadership and tactical genius-she dissembles on the crucial matter of his sexuality. After Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaistion (one of his generals) were the best-known best friends of the ancient world. In the novel, however, though the author surrounds her hero with Hephaistion, an overt invert, and a band of other young...
...years between this and the second Mabuse Lang's dramatic construction and visual style underwent radical changes, changes basically of social perspective. Leaving films full of personalities, he began to make long-shot Expressionist dramas without real characters: the two Nibelungen movies and Metropolis. Abandoning these fatalistic myth-abstractions, he returned in M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) to films that treated social reality directly in the actions of a few closely connected characters...