Word: betterment
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...made eight years ago. Nonetheless, by the time Captain Courtney (Errol Flynn) and Lieutenant Scott (David Niven) have shared their last toast and their last battle, audiences are likely to feel that the familiar sound-track crescendo of zooming motors and breaking bottles has rarely been heard to better effect...
...lozenges to Mylon. The boy struggled, gagged, then broke into spasms of coughing and retched up nine marbles. "I swallowed them five years ago," he gasped. Three days later he said he felt better and his father called in reporters and babbled about a new medical discovery...
...some still resentful parents, rowdy boys cut Principal Attig's telephone wires, strewed his papers, fired his wastebasket. unhinged doors. All this Principal Attig bore patiently. He cracked no heads, said nothing to parents or school board, tried to solve his problem alone. He also refused a better job. remarking grimly: "I must stay and give Oswego the educational program it is worthy...
Outward Bound (by Sutton Vane; produced by The Playhouse Co.). Seeing an attractive play again after 15 years is usually as disillusioning as re-encountering a once-attractive woman. But Outward Bound comes off better than "well-preserved," still retains its humor, imaginativeness, suspense and its more elusive quality of "theatre." Profound, or even provocative, it never was; the play is effective just because it treats the idea of death simply, concretely, familiarly. The appeal of Playwright Sutton Vane's imagination is not its incandescence or daring, but its deep kinship with Everyman...
When at last the Examiner comes on board to judge them, the audience settles back to relish the play's meatiest, juiciest moments. But they are also its weakest: the inquisitor is too whimsically conceived, vice is too glibly punished, virtue too sentimentally recompensed. Perhaps a better artist (though a less canny storyteller) would have rung down his curtain as his characters, in bewilderment and trepidation, reached the threshold of their eternal home. It takes at least a Dante to draw a convincing diagram of Hell...