Word: cafee
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Maxwell Anderson's 25th play, Truckline Cafe, reached Broadway last week. Without providing any excitement of its own, it managed to provoke quite a little...
Setting its scene in a populous diner along a California highway, Truckline Cafe takes a look at the dangling lives and dislocated marriages resulting from the war. It is most concerned with two couples: a former soldier who kills his unfaithful wife; a former soldier whose wife had believed him dead, taken a lover, then run away when she learned her husband was still alive. The husband tracks her down, but even after confessing his own infidelity, he cannot blot out her sense of guilt and defeat. What largely changes her mind is the futile tragedy of the other couple...
Truckline Cafe wholly muffed a chance to give dramatic, or even melodramatic force to a timely theme. In its casual moments it was flaccid, in its crucial ones unreal. Playwright Anderson's small army of bit parts had an effect of shambling vaudeville. His main story became a hollow study of two people speaking high-busted clichés. Too often, as in the past, he slubbed words into what was neither poetic language nor human speech...
...professor of philosophy (1930-43). During the war he spent nine months in a German war prison, then emerged to play an active role in the Resistance (he served with the Communist-dominated Front National). Now he is France's most discussed writer: his temple, the respectably bohemian Cafe de Flore on the Left Bank. There he spends most of his writing and preaching day. Simultaneously he works on a philosophic book, a play, a novel, a host of articles...
...already obvious that his time was short. His lungs were bad. A black-eyed, elegant young fellow, he kept to himself, painted furiously, and destroyed most of it as he went along. Soon Matisse, Picasso, Utrillo and Brancusi took him up, introduced him to cubism, African sculpture, and cafe life. The combination freed him from his academic inhibitions: he began painting pictures that were worth keeping. Then he set about destroying himself...