Word: arsenic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Twenty-five minutes later, more mortar shells dropped into the palace, and the private army of the Binh Xuyen, 2,000 terrorists in arsenic-green berets, opened concerted fire against three main Vietnamese Nationalist strongpoints. Ngo Dinh Diem, long criticized for pacifism and procrastination, first ordered counterfire against the Binh Xuyen defenses. One hour later he sharply raised the stakes, and told the army to clear the Binh Xuyen out of the city...
...reasonably macabre farce, which can't help bringing Arsenic and Old Lace to mind, The Honeys has its fine wacky moments and amusing passages-whether bright remarks, clever pantomime, comic props, a funny murder scene, skillful acting or Ben Edwards' sets. If, for all that, there are a good many lulls, it is perhaps because the play is happier in its details than in its fundamental design. The Honeys is fairly safe playing murder for laughs because its victims are so loathsome. But Arsenic and Old Lace could play safer-and be much funnier-because its murderers were...
...cooling the weather but not the city's jittery nerves. There were quiet Buddhist ceremonies in Chinese pagodas, a pink and white wedding at the cathedral, and an outward pose of calm. But heavily armed gangsters and cops of the Binh Xuyen sect, in their arsenic-green berets, patrolled the boulevards, ordering traffic, and blockading the city's approaches so that they could control the price and supply of rice. Steel-helmeted nationalist paratroopers of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem were also out on patrol, but they were restrained from getting rid of the terrorists by an uneasy...
...author revels in such lines as "He probably ate his wife" or "The poison will perforate his stomach like a cancelled check." And it does, in its best moments, achieve the same delightful morbidness that now characterizes the Addams people, just as it once distinguished the characters in Arsenic and Old Lace...
...imagine, however, that playwright Roald Dahl is so unoriginal as to use arsenic for his murder weapon. Mary and Maggie Honey are far above such prosaity. When they dispatch their husbands it is by more subtle methods, like poisoning them with oysters or with the chopped-up whiskers of a tiger, or hitting them over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. This last method is particularly fortunate, for it subsequently allows the ladies-in a suitably festive spirit, and accompanied by two policemen-to cat the murder weapon...