Word: craftsmanly
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...beat was the Northwest, a region he loves with a sincere passion. He covered 2,200,000 sq. mi. from the Aleutians to upper California and west to Montana and Wyoming. A frugal craftsman, he was disinclined to write one story on one subject for one magazine; instead he broke up each piece of research into three or four fragments, built them into separate stories, and squeezed the maximum possible return out of his reporting...
...well known jingle applies particularly well to Clifford Odets' new play, The Flowering Peach. Whenever Odets is naughty or cute, whether to shock or titillate the audience, he wins laughs or gasps of admiration. But when he sticks to his calling as that rare theatrical type--a thoughtful craftsman--he achieves mature drama...
...play's forbidding tone or gloomy subject matter that makes it, after an impressive first half, so palpably decline. It is, rather, its compulsion to prolong the agony without knowing how to dramatize it. The fine craftsman and melodramatist who wrote Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, the novelist who much more deftly approached the theme of The Living Room in The Heart of the Matter, has, in his first play, allowed his anxious emotions to overwhelm him. The Living Room too much batters its theme before the suicide, and again for a whole scene after...
...less ambitious transcription from Henry James, The Innocents, proved William Archibald an accomplished craftsman. In some two hours imposed by the theatre, however, even he can't execute an intricate portrait laid on with the brush strokes of eight hundred pages. He has drawn the lines faithfully, attentive to perspective and detail, but the shadings are necessarily hasty and the tone is flat. While elegant, costumed by Beaton and framed in the Eckarts' sets, the portrait remains a sketch. Worst of all, the portrait is dull, for there is neither life nor appeal in the Lady's eyes...
Whatever credit Horton Foote earns as a playwright not for being a hack, he tends to forfeit from not being a craftsman. Writing of small town Texans, he gropes among their crotchets and habits and heartaches, and at his best achieves touching moments about touching characters. But, in general, he has a certain sense of the blundering mischance of life without knowing how to project it. All too often, he writes muddled scenes involving muddled people...