Word: mayer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spite of its manifest and manifold weaknesses, Mr. Edwin Justus Mayer's muddled and misbegotten pastiche persists in being perversely entertaining. Mr. Mayer has attempted something so vast and fascinating that even in its failure, shadows of success can be seen intermittently dancing: cleverness shadowing forth brilliance, and excitement grandeur...
Children of Darkness is couched in Mr. Mayer's approximation of the elegant, cynical wit which the English Restoration famously bequeathed to the eighteenth century. It is set in an annex to the Newgate jail, where the villains of The Beggar's Opera sang like caged birds. Yet it obstreperously violates a cardinal rule of the genre to which it aspires to belong: the rule that says that no character may be endowed with the ability to feel profound and communicable pain. The picturesque discomfiture and knavery that are familiar and amusing in Congreve and Gay are gradually...
There is no sign in Mr. Mayer of the uncompromising toughness of mind needed for the task he sets himself. For all his surface cynicism he is worm-eaten with sentimentality. Whenever he tries to rationalize the situations he creates, to give the audience a perspective on the action, the sentimentality crops out depressingly. Because of it, many moments that are supposed to be touching come close to being laughable...
...shows us, that we catch a glimpse of evil as an absolute, an ingrained disposition towards total selfishness, a combination of the willingness and the ability to blight lives, rather than a mere evaluation derived from totaling up a number of acts. At moments, evil lives on Mr. Mayer's stage; if we are never able to understand it, we can feel it as each of the characters strives to get possession of another's worldly goods or body or soul. This living principle of evil generates a sense that something important is at stake in all these deftly tangled...