Word: behrman
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...Time for Comedy (Warner Bros.) has the same title as a comedy by S. N. Behrman in which Katharine Cornell achieved a mild Broadway and cross-country success last year. While his characters lounged on soft settees gulping highballs for three acts, Behrman argued that playwrights whose talents run to comedy should stick to their typewriters in times of crisis, leave world-saving to professionals. So original was this notion that audiences gladly sat through two and a half hours of inaction...
Converting so much talk into a film required virtual scrapping of the Behrman version. Scripters Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein proceeded to remodel Hero Gaylord Esterbrook (James Stewart) into a country bumpkin with an odd flair for bright comedy. His hesitant romance and marriage with Actress Linda Paige (Rosalind Russell) becomes a slapstick backstage burlesque containing the only fun in the film. From then on Epstein gets tangled with Behrman in a confusing hodgepodge of drawing-room wit heavily weighted with dramatic overtones...
...European influences, which, assimilated and transmuted, helped to produce the Provincetown Playhouse and its fellows. He proceeds to take up chronologically the work of George Kelly, Sidney Howard and the earlier plays of Maxwell Anderson: the achievement of Eugene O'Neill; comedy, from George S. Kaufman and S. N. Behrman to George Abbott; the so-called "social drama": and the poetic drama of Maxwell Anderson...
...society's own Dr. Johnson. A fabulous night owl, he prowls from 52nd Street's 21 to 57th Street's musical hangouts followed by an army of press agents, newsmen, vaudevillians and cinemactors, puts on high-powered conversational exhibitions with his good friend Playwright Sam Behrman, drops pearls of grit-edged humor for all who will listen...
...three names, three figures who have given the contemporary stage in America a great deal of its high quality and some of its greatness,--Cornell, McClintic, and Miclziner, star, director, and stage designer. They put on a production so polished, so beautifully done in every respect that Mr. Behrman's temporary foibles fade into the background...