Word: cigar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...just died. Hughie had per formed the almost ecclesiastical function of believing in Erie's shabby bravado, his tales of bedding girls from the Follies and beating the cards and dice, of winning on the "bangtails" at the track and the time in New Orleans he lit a cigar with a C-note. Hughie was his audience, the receptacle of the deceits that keep Erie alive. Charley (Peter Maloney), the new clerk, listens in the dim lobby with a sort of it-takes-all-kinds distraction, but eventually and subtly is transformed into the new Hughie, Erie...
...supposed to be nice middleclass folks. Maybe the moral resonance of the play infects the actors with a louder evil. Anyway the only ones who can carry off the bourgeois ambivalence are those with their own natural appeal, like John Carito's Journeyman. The others sometimes blow too-sinister cigar smoke, and take over the simpler, symbolic function of the leering village idiot...
...recent Presidents have relished the perquisites, their aides have liked them even more, which has contributed to the problem. One can recall Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary, ensconced on the fantail of the presidential yacht, his cigar aglow as White House waiters plied his friends with food and drink, and soft music wafted over the waters of Palm Beach. "You'd better enjoy it now," said one observer to Salinger, "because when you go out of office, it's all over." Salinger grinned widely, tapped the ash off his cigar, and replied: "Do I ever know...
...Jimmy!" Cosell yelled to McMillian as the basketball player was being helped off the track, 'I've got to do an interview with you." Undaunted by the large crowd of fans and officials, Cosell plunged ahead with a post-crisis analysis while O.J. Simpson held his cigar...
What gives the evening a high polish is the cast. Anne Baxter plays the Italian princess and the former mistress with a likable and knowing broadness. Hume Cronyn's cigar-smoking millionaire sounds a bit too much like George Burns, but his Hugo is a masterpiece of foxy pomposity. Best of all is Jessica Tandy, first as the harridan in Maud and then as the great man's dry, abused wife. She endows the woman with an odd gallantry that Coward himself may have possessed...