Word: faustian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Informer" belongs to that remarkably rare category of movies that aspire to real tragedy. The specific time and place of the story become only details in the portrayal of a man who has sold the modern equivalent of his Faustian soul, all his ties with society. For the price of two passages to America, he betrays a friend in the Irish Resistance movement, and as he walks through Dublin at night, afraid of everyone, he becomes a Judas, and a truly tragic figure. While the picture takes him through one night of repentance, drinking, boasting, but mainly fear...
Steppenwolf tells the story, largely in dream events, of a fractured personality -Germany's, perhaps-tinged with Lutheran, Faustian, Nietzschean and Freudian influences, and in general quite a mess. An earnest, introverted work, full of prescience (World War II is assumed throughout), it stands, as fiction, deep in the shadow of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain...
...other operas to come: The Devil and Daniel Webster, Stephen Vincent Benet's Faustian tale of a New Hampshire farmer who sold out to the devil, set to music by Columbia Professor Douglas Moore; Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Old Maid and the Thief, a deft, bubbling radio opera commissioned by NBC, first given in 1939; Four Saints in Three Acts, with Virgil Thomson's gravely melodious music to Gertrude Stein's nonsensical words; Tennessee's Partner, a Quinto Maganini opera on a Bret Harte short story, which has lain unperformed, unorchestrated since 1934; Aaron...