Word: cronyn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...students insisted on mispronouncing Conroy's name)-and a profound shortage of dramatic conflict. The children, needless to say, are adorable. They are rendered all the more touching by the superintendent of an inhumane school system and an inflexible principal (the former represented by Hume Cronyn in one of his patented portrayals of the small in spirit; the latter played with a not unsympathetic strength by Madge Sinclair). Many of the children cannot spell their names; none know the name of the ocean that surrounds them. The surf regularly claims lives among them because no one-until Conroy...
Today. Actor Hume Cronyn pays tribute to poet Robert Frost on what would have been his 100th birthday. Ch. 4, 7 a.m. 2 hours...
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...
Speech is dispensed with in Act Without Words, in which Cronyn mimes the frustrations of a man lost in the desert who is variously tempted by water bottles that elude his grasp and ropes that foil his attempts to hang himself. The character is a kind of vaudeville Sisyphus, and one can thank Beckett for the small favor that the playlet lasts only ten minutes. Not I lasts 15. It is the seemingly final verbal spasm of a woman of 70 (Tandy) who recounts fragments of her life and concludes that even her suffering does not add up to much...
Despite a querulous vocal pitch, Jessica Tandy endows these tiny marine skeletons of drama with shimmering glints of life, and Hume Cronyn brings a gusto to his roles that adds flesh to their bones. But their admirable efforts are largely wasted. Life is a rum show, Beckett keeps on telling us. So, alas, are his plays...