Word: fervor
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...devout -they number just nine-assemble in the drafty little stone building. The pastor (Gunnar Björnstrand) serves Communion as if he were an actor in a play near the end of a long run-withdrawn, saying the words without compassion. The contrast between this remoteness and the fervor on the faces of the communicants as they receive the Host and the Cup states Bergman's theme: a vain search for faith down ways that are closed. Besought, after the service, to counsel a fisherman (Max von Sydow) sick with world-sadness because "the Chinese now have...
Again, last December, when the Bay of Pigs prisoners were ransomed from Castro, Kennedy greeted them at Miami's Orange Bowl, and, with a fervor that set the exiles aflame, proclaimed: "I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana...
Poor Percy is the emotional fulcrum of the play, and probably says more to an English than to an American playgoer. Britain's Dyer is not an angry playwright, but he shares the current British theatrical fervor for discovering the lower classes. This social ferment is a quarter of a century out of phase with the U.S. experience of the Depression that animated the old Group Theater's concept of the hero as ultra common man. The sad truth is that the Percys of the world are the small beer of the drama, and in two hours they...
...century malaise, Lack of Communication. But if her fiction is wanting, her historiography is not. With painstaking care, she has woven each of the skeins of medieval life into a vivid tapestry that shows the loutishness and insensitivity of the baronial landholders, the obtuseness of the peasantry, the twisted fervor of churchmen who found virtue in the wholesale slaughter of heretics, and the disturbing contrast between the warmth of Jewish communal life and the demeaning nature of usury...
...British upper classes are smugly ignorant of life; the lower classes are self-taught fanatics and uncouth blackguards. As destiny's dutiful darling, G.B.S. slays these asses with his jawbone. Minus his customary wit, Shaw is a nagging scold. In a final soliloquy, delivered with fine evangelistic fervor by Robert Preston, the great iconoclast pitiably begs for an icon worthy of his worship...