Word: frightful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nine days the murder trial of Berlin-born Gunther Fritz Podola, 30, was postponed while a London jury considered a plea the like of which had never before been heard in an English court of law (TIME, Sept. 21). The plea: in "the very severe fright" caused by the violence of his arrest, Podola had lost his memory, and so was unfit to plead to the charge of shooting a London cop. Last week, after a procession of experts had offered conflicting medical opinion on whether Podola was, in fact, suffering from "hysterical amnesia," the jury finally decided that...
...defense. But when the time came for Podola's trial last week, it was neither police brutality nor ordinary insanity at the time of the crime that was offered as Podola's defense. Instead, Defense Counsel Frederick Lawton, Q.C., argued that "a very, very severe fright," possibly triggered by the events of Podola's arrest, had "brought about his loss of memory...
...Toronto Art Gallery has had its share of thefts. A small Rouault (The Surgeon) vanished from its walls in 1955 and is still missing. The same Rubens that is now at large was also stolen five years ago. That time, the thief triggered an alarm upon leaving, took fright and dumped his loot in Queen's Park as he ran. What makes art theft so fascinating is that the haul is more a burden than a bargain. Unlike gold or jewelry, a painting cannot be converted into something else. Art "fences'' are nonexistent; art dealers, no matter...
...movie is about an inquisitive doctor with a ghoulish enthusiasm for slicing up the cadavers of those who died in fear. He is sure that fright is a living thing that survives in corpses in much the same way that hair and fingernails have been popularly believed to grow after death. So he performs an autopsy on the body of an electrocuted criminal, frightens his wife unconscious by faking her murder, finally shocks a deaf-mute into a heart-stopping nightmare-blood running from the bathroom spigot, a rubber-masked fiend with knife and hatchet popping out of closets...
...They were equally low on profits. Then, in 1957, he made a horror film called Macabre. It was not much of a picture-in fact, it was a wretched thing -but Bill paid Lloyds of London $5,000 for life insurance covering anyone in the audience who died of fright. The picture cost only $80,000, grossed an estimated $1,200,000. This year, Bill released The House on Haunted Hill. The picture cost $150,000, but he spent $250,000 manufacturing skeletons that dance off the screen and dangle out over the audiences. The gimmick has paid...