Word: ghoulish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cartoonist Searle studied at the Technical School, whose windows overlooked the County School tennis courts. As these also served as a playground and basketball courts, there was very little time during the day that these courts were vacant ... so Mr. Searle had ample opportunity to look for ghoulish girls. As a contemporary of Mr. Searle's and an "old girl" of the high school, that knock-kneed, spotty-faced gargoyle wearing glasses, in the chem lab of St. Trinian's [see cut] could quite possibly...
...last twelve years, these ghoulish girls have won fame & fortune for their creator. A wiry, goateed man who still suffers from the "cab-horse knees" acquired in a World War II Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Cartoonist Ronald Searle has seen St. Trinian's become a part of the British public school folklore. His first two cartoon books have both gone through nine printings, and the school itself has appeared in skits in at least three musical revues. Today its bloody playing fields are as famous as Eton's, and its horrible little girls are quite as well...
Unburdened with any particular sense of the realistic or humane, Stalag 17 is a heartless jape that manages to be both lively and amusing. The sardonic talents of Producer-Director-Co-Scenarist Billy (Sunset Boulevard) Wilder are well tuned to these rather ghoulish goings on. Taking the action out of the barrack confines and into the barbed-wire compound at intervals, he has made a fluent film of the play. He has also got crisp characterizations from his cast. William Holden gives one of his quietly competent performances as a cynical G.I. Otto Preminger and Sig Ruman play comedy Nazis...
...morbidity, the picture is in no sense ghoulish. The children carry through their scheme seriously and tenderly, with a religious sense of dedication. Throughout, there is a subtle blending of a primitively religious motif with the workings of a subconscious death-wish on two ingenuous and sensitive minds, all to considerable dramatic effect. The two children chosen to play the leads--Brigitta Fossey and Georges Poujouly--are in every way equal to the demands of their roles...
...gusto, whether barking at charity solicitors, cringing before ghosts, demoniacally fleecing a business associate or lavishing favors on a startled Cratchit. Sim gets his best support from Kathleen Harrison, who expands the Dickens vignette of Scrooge's glum charwoman into a life-size comic portrait. Sample: the hilariously ghoulish scene that shows her cheerfully plying the rag & bones man with Scrooge's deathbed effects...