Word: caste
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...visit to the Plymouth sometime in the next few weeks can be justified on the grounds both of entertainment and of education, for "Angel Street" is a well-nigh perfect example of what a cracker-jack cast can do to rescue mediocre melodrama from becoming ridiculous. The play itself is just another mystery, complete with eerily fading gas-lights, a sex-hungry housemaid, and brooches with secret compartments. If read, it would be more an exercise in credulity than an experience in literature...
Sanders doesn't get much help from the rest of the cast, but this time it's the scenarists' turn to get roasted. Years of maiming plots and substituting happy endings have finally made Hollywood go off the other deep end. Using the outmoded author-narrator technique that novelist Maugham barely sneaked by with, the scenarists have deadened a story that might have been exiting. Every time the story seems to be moving under its own power, or rather, Sanders' power, the scene fades and narrator Herbert Marshall starts to analyze the situation and the characters with an obviousness that...
When it comes to being obnoxious, he's overshadowed by everyone else in the cast. First of all, there's Sterling Holloway. Holloway looks, acts, and grovels like a local vice-president of the Cretin's Union, who models strait-jackets in his spare time. After him comes Felix Bressart, who is probably a nice fellow to his own friends, but then who wants to bother with those missing links? Bressart, lovable chap that he is, divides his time between kicking Holloway around and trying to marry his own daughter off to the local herring czar...
...sofa, with his snuffbox ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour in his even, soft, deliberate tone. . . . Mr. Webster, leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter . . . would illuminate an evening. Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and never could be extinguished, would come in sometimes." She visited Madison at his home, an old man "in his chair, with a pillow behind him; his little person wrapped in a black silk gown; a warm grey and white...
...esthetically ugly or morally wrong in the world proceeds from people's misconceptions of reality. People misconceive reality, according to his diagnosis, because they think about it without imagination or by rote. This distresses Stevens, because such thinking litters up the world with all kinds of rusty cast-iron conceptions...