Word: dianas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Replacing the old-fashioned fiery public debate, TV's countless panels run a week-long talkathon on every conceivable subject. To Literary Critic Diana Trilling, it seems a bad trade. The trouble: TV's moderators. Wrote Critic Trilling last week in the New York Herald Tribune: "If there was once a time when the moderator was a referee between antagonists, today he is a ubiquitous avoider or smoother-over of differences. One of the most distinguished is Howard K. Smith of The Great Challenge (CBS). Let one of the discussants so much as intimate a fresh idea...
...Much, Too Soon (Warner), a sort of woman-on-the-rocks chaser to I'll Cry Tomorrow, may make a lot of moviegoers feel that they have had one too many. The film is based on the best-selling autobiography (TIME, April 15, 1957) in which Actress Diana Barrymore (skillfully assisted by Author Gerold Frank) told in embarrassing detail about her troubles with booze and men. In the movie the booze flows a good deal more freely than the narrative, which reels along like a drunken monologue with a familiar moral: weak people should avoid strong drink...
...marriage of the century" between Actor-Painter John Barrymore and Socialite-Poetaster Blanche Oelrichs (who wrote and kept a salon as Michael Strange) was fondly expected to produce a great work of art, but all that ever came of it was Diana, "a fat little girl [with] straight black hair cut in stringy bangs." When Diana was four, Mother loosed her wedlock on Father, who went west to make movies and whoopee-a disappearance disastrous to Diana, or so the picture suggests. At any rate, when Diana was 20, she made her Broadway debut to impressive reviews, and went west...
...according to the film, Diana (Dorothy Malone) married a Broadway actor who came home from work one day to find her drunk and in bed with the man who later became Husband No. 2, a "tennis bum" who refused to work for fear he might "use the wrong muscles," and who took sadistic pleasure in driving tennis balls at Diana's face. Husband No. 3 was almost as big a lush as Diana, and together they rapidly drank up all the money she had made and inherited. According to the script, she wound up doing take-offs (including clothes...
...Frank proved himself a competent amateur head-shrinker. But in the movie the psychologizing is vulgarly done, and every possible appeal is made to the sort of customer who likes to rub his nose in other people's business. Those who do not can only sadly agree with Diana, who at one point remarks that there is no sense in telling her story. "Living it was bad enough...