Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hers (by Fay & Michael Kanin) uses a comic framework as neat and narrow as a coffin. Written by a pair of playwrights who are married, it concerns a pair who are divorced (after two Broadway failures). In a freak legal wrangle, because they have both thought up a play with the same plot, they get a court order to write it together. Propinquity makes hearts grow fonder, and they decide, if the new play clicks, to remarry. Then they decide that love outweighs success. and to remarry whatever happens...
Playwright Bowles's plot (complicated by a fatal accident offstage) and point (life must progress from fakery to reality) are the feeblest parts of her drama. But she wins high marks for theatricality and comic invention. Each of the five scenes is beautifully placed and paced. They are peopled with some fine original types, notably Mildred Dunnock as a tiptoeing mother who achieves a boozy sublimation after the death of her jet-propelled offspring (Muriel Berkson), Jean Stapleton, a triumphantly fun-loving barmaid, and Martita Reid, a Mexican dowager of sufficient force to faze even indomitable Actress Anderson. Director...
...previous novel, Shadows Move Among Them (TIME, Sept. 17, 1951), Guiana's Edgar Mittelholzer showed a rare hand at distilling weird comedy from sex, religion and primitive passion. But his new novel (his sixth) is neither weird nor comic. It shows what happens when the laws of the jungle are replaced by the codes of the suburbs, and it portrays with grimness the lives of colored people whose worship of ancestral ju-jus has changed into keeping up with the Joneses...
Introduced to Cinemactress Marilyn Monroe at a Hollywood party given by Comic Bob Hope, Major General William F. Dean said, according to gossipists: "Meeting you almost makes up for my not seeing a woman in 36 months...
...Girls (Paramount) casts Bob Hope as "the world's oldest living chorus boy." He thinks when he is asked to stand in for the leading man (Tony Martin) that at last he is flying high. Actually, he is just a sitting duck for "The Slasher," a fine comic heavy (Robert Strauss) who gnaws at his lines as if they were ripe black betel nuts. The whole thing is unfortunate for Singer Rosemary Clooney, who is still new to pictures. Almost every time she opens her mouth to sing, Hope shoves...