Word: heroic
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...Bickford, Lillian Gish, John Saxon, Albert Salmi, June Walker, Joseph Wiseman). It was directed by John Huston, whose Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the best westerns ever made, and it was shot from a script by Ben (The Asphalt Jungle) Maddow that seizes a timely and heroic theme, the struggle between human feeling and race prejudice, and develops it in epic rhythms and with epic force...
Director Huston is in fact at the top of his form as an entertainer in the grandstand manner. Unfortunately, he has tried to be more than an entertainer. The Unforgiven is designed and executed as a heroic poem, a sort of cow-country Cid. Its pace is slow and noble. Its frames are often stark tableaux. Its characters are simplified and enlarged into figures for a legend. But the legend, like most synthetic folklore, fails to come alive. How could it when the sod hut looks like a page from HOUSE & HOME, when the back-country heroine has an elocution...
...Glass Menagerie is both "positive and healthy," he says, "eulogizes the heroic qualities of human nature in adversity." Admitting the "negative charge" in Tennessee's other plays-he calls Cat on a Hot Tin Roof "a symphony of evil"-Dakin nonetheless finds an implied positive in each. Rape of a sister-in-law (A Streetcar Named Desire), homosexuality (Cat, etc.), cannibalism (Suddenly, Last Summer), garden-variety adultery (Orpheus Descending) and castration (Sweet Bird of Youth} may not be radiant with uplift, but "there can be no valid moral objection to the exposure of this sort...
...young tenor appearing as Radames in Verdi's A'ida had sung "magnificently," said the Manchester Guardian; his voice had "sweetness, heroic size and natural musicality." That review, and others like it, gave the tenor pause: "I decided I had better go somewhere and learn to sing...
...Bergman's pictures suddenly brighten. He makes three comedies (A Lesson in Love, Dreams, Smiles of a Summer Night), in which his first worthwhile women appear and begin to educate their demoralized and dependent men. The education obviously succeeds, for in The Seventh Seal, Bergman's first heroic hero appears: a knight who delays implacable Death long enough to accomplish "one single meaningful action." He preserves the lives of Mia and Jof (Mary and Joseph)" and their infant son, who will one day ''perform the one impossible trick" of making a ball stand still...