Word: reptilian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...expansive ground floor of Paris' Musée National d'Art Moderne looked like a specter-haunted landscape from Mars. Birdmen, ten inches tall, made up of a human thorax, bare-boned ribs and a spinal column topped by oversized beak and reptilian eyes, stared back at the spectators. A human-size Praying Mantis in female form crouched ready to spring; a Shepherd with half-decayed body tottering on three spindle legs looked more like an abandoned sheep carcass than a human figure. The reason for this nightmare in Paris last week: 82 pieces finished in the last...
...pool is covered with a green scum; the magnificent halls are damp and echoing; the pupils riot over a dinner of sausage and potatoes. There are four teachers: two male nonentities and two striking women -frail Vera Clouzot and mannish but beautiful Simone Signoret. Headmaster Paul Meurisse is a reptilian thug who is married to Vera, keeps Simone as his mistress, and treats both of the women abominably...
...camera tricks, engulfing shadows, dizzying vistas of colonnades and architectural arabesques, the film moves forward with a pulse-quickening stir and bustle. As the jealous Moor, Welles captures the falcon-look of a Kabyle from the Atlas Mountains; Michael McLiammoir plays a foul-fiend of an lago with reptilian intensity; and Suzanne Clothier as Desdemona, though not quite entrancing enough to "sing the savageness out of a bear," wins compassion as she is bewilderingly overwhelmed by her mate and fate...
Only the supporting actors lift Rogue Cop out of its mediocrity. Olive Carey, as a scruffy old crone of a stool pigeon, is convincingly reluctant to sing for free. George Raft is the same old master of reptilian menace. The lesser cops and crooks look real enough, but Janet Leigh is too sweet and winsome as a reformed tart; Detective Robert Taylor strolls from pillow to punch, always immaculately and incredibly well-groomed, even for an overpaid...
They pondered a chamber full of half-reptilian horrors and nocturnal landscapes by slick old Surrealist Max Ernst, and voted him one of the three grand prizes of $2,400, presumably for the importance of being Ernst. Another grand prize went to a roomful of gay blobs and squiggles done in primary colors by the artful Catalan, Joán MirÓ, who has made a career of painting like a five-year-old, only better. The grand prize for sculpture was awarded to playful and mysterious Alsatian Jean Arp and his crowd of polished bronze and marble lumps, each...