Word: albatross
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nobody Loves an Albatross has as its hero-heel a man who can kiss his own reflection in a mirror and really mean it. Nat Bentley is a television writer-producer in Hollywood, but his most inspired production is his ebulliently maleficent self. He is an imp of distilled evil. He is a triple-tongued double dealer, a glib Vesuvius of fantasy and falsehood, a perpetual-emotion machine with nary an honest feeling...
...chimpanzee that plays Lady Macbeth. The dialogue is more quippish than witty, but the hip mass-media-men-at-work lingo scatters the laughs over an occasional drab patch of script. The life of the play is in the instinctive mendacity of its con-man hero. The Albatross flies where Sammy Glick once...
...Stork was magnificent. He caged eight of 13 shots--almost all of them long, esthetic jumpers from the corner. He got nine rebounds. And Inman was brilliant on defense against Fran Ryan, even though he played most of the second half draped with the albatross of four personal fouls...
Nobody Loves an Albatross fails as a moral lesson. Preston's remains a countryish buffoon from beginning to end; his plight never forces the audience to examine the necessity for honesty. The pathos raises no ethical questions; it simply dampens the already soggy humor...
...outset of Act III, he does produce a good script, he basks in a few short moments of glory until his fraud is discovered: he stole the story from a Shirley Temple movie on the Late Show. At precisely this point the humor drains out of Nobody Loves an Albatross, for the audience begins to realize just how pathetic Preston is. His friends all deliver homilies to the effect that honesty is the best policy; his secretary (she loves him and he wants her) turns her back on him. To Preston, though, life is a floating con game...