Word: cowards
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...interesting, but also slowly enough to have something left for the end. Two of the three principals have solved their problem well. Robert Jordan gives a very impressive performance as a pacifist newspaperman with an exterior compounded of confidence and arrogance. Yet underneath his surface the man is a coward, and his fear eventually leads him to hell. One of the two women, however, clearly belongs there from the very beginning. As portrayed by Charlotte Clark, her personality appears to contain only venom, with lesbianism as the motive force of her poison. Miss Clark does not always convey the viciousness...
...unusually serious kind. In his direction, Lewis R. Foster has managed to make ideas as well as characters come clear, and when the lines are especially good, his actors tactfully subordinate themselves to what they are saying. Don Taylor and Wendell Corey play neatly in tandem as the cowardly hero and the heroic coward, and France's Nicole Maurey does something rare in dramatic history. She makes a believable human being of the sentimental prostitute. But it is Mickey Rooney who brings off the best scene: a crap game so shatteringly funny that it almost breaks up the picture...
Moscow diplomats circulated another (probably apocryphal) footnote to Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech. As Khrushchev told sobbingly how the peerless leader had actually been a killer, coward and sadist all along, a written question was handed up to him. He read out the note to the assembled Party Congress: "What were you doing when Stalin was alive?" Said Khrushchev: "There is no signature on this note. Will the author please stand up?" No one stood up, so Khrushchev said: "I will count to three. Then let the author rise." He counted to three, but no one stood...
Only Playwright-Actor-Producer Noel Coward managed to give the door a backspin. After two shows (Together with Music, Blithe Spirit), Sponsor Ford Motor Co. decided Coward was "too sophisticated" and vetoed his third show, a version of his 1943 play Present Laughter, scheduled for May. Said Coward amiably: "If they don't like it, I'll do another for them. After all, I've written 26 plays and it shouldn't take long to whip out a new one." Mollified, Ford settled for a TV interpretation of Coward's superpatriotic This Happy Breed...
...playwrights only Shaw is placed above suspicion of shoddiness, and the long arm of an O'Casey grudge can reach far back to cuff an offender ("Pinero . . . turned the wine of drama into water. A miracle, a miracle!"). Three pieces are devoted to the demerits of Noel Coward, whose works are finally summed up in two words (of George Jean Nathan's): "zymotic bilge." As for the "flea minds" of Ireland who are not properly reverent to their self-exiled bard, "these critics do not injure O'Casey, but they disgrace Ireland." He feels...