Word: ackland
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Crime and Punishment (adapted from Dostoevsky's novel by Rodney Ackland; produced by Robert Whitehead & Oliver Rea) is perhaps too great a novel to be tampered with. But by the same token it would seem able to withstand a lot of tampering. Dostoevsky's great study of crime and punishment is also a tense story of crime and detection. Before its arrogant Nietzschean murderer Raskolnikov (John Gielgud) is guided toward confession and atonement by a humble Christian prostitute (Dolly Haas), he is played with, cat-&-mouse, by the Moscow police...
...stage version managed to bury not only the deeper half but the whole of Dostoevsky's novel-giving it, as the only compensation, a highly picturesque funeral. Actor Gielgud's Raskolnikov can be enjoyed as a brilliantly mannered performance, but as a portrait it is worthless. Ackland's stage piece itself is like a translation that inserts innumerable adjectives while omitting all the verbs; it substitutes atmosphere for action, and theatrical color for dramatic force. The stage set-a cross-section of Raskolnikov's swarming rooming house-is a fine device for squeezing...
...after his death, Duke decided it did not want William Ackland's legacy because it had "too many strings attached." Duke already has the bodies of three benefactors-all tobacco-rich Dukes-buried in its Memorial Chapel...
...Ackland's nieces & nephews rushed to court to seek the fortune they had given up as lost. The University of North Carolina (with the late Ambassador to Britain O. Max Gardner as lawyer) and Rollins (with ex-U.S. Attorney General Homer S. Cummings) followed. First to lose out, after five years' litigation, were the nieces & nephews. That left the two colleges to fight it out between themselves...
Last week a District of Columbia Court ruled that in his last days Ackland had been definitely partial to Rollins and that Rollins, therefore, should get the money. Unless the decision is reversed on appeal, Rollins will have its museum, and Ackland's bones a place to rest...