Word: doltishness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...20th century, he assumes, Britain's best minds had realized that their country's economy could no longer compete with those of the U.S., Russia and China under a haphazard system that prevented some bright children of the poor from reaching responsible jobs rightfully theirs, and fortified doltish sons of the rich and well-born in positions of power. The answer: meritocracy, which is rule by the most talented, determined according to the formula I+E = M (Intelligence plus Effort equals Merit...
...Pulitzer Prizewinning 1924 novel. However, the ground has been pretty well cropped-over by now, and the corn cannot be strongly recommended for human consumption. Jane Wyman, nonetheless, injects an attractive glow into the pious heroine, the pure little rich girl who bears poverty, hard work and a doltish husband so meekly that, as would appear, her sufferings later give her the unchallenged right to run her son's life for him. Sterling Hayden is convincingly uninteresting as the husband. Nancy Olson, the son's girl friend, does about as well as anybody could playing a young woman...
...parts in the play are only caricatures and hard to make anything more. Thomas Gaydos, as the narrow-minded trustee, manages to combine his own talents with the role and come out with a believable, repellent Ed Keller. Herbert Appleman as a doltish undergraduate football ace, does not fare so well. His part remains a caricature and at times an embarrassing...
Fumed Oak, billed as "an unpleasant comedy," is the best of the lot. After 17 dreary years of marriage, a respectable suburbanite walks out on his nagging wife, shrewish mother-in-law and doltish daughter. But first, he tells them all off. Betty Ann Davies, Mary Merrall and Dorothy Gordon are suitably unpleasant as the ladies, and Stanley Holloway is just about right as the long-suffering worm who turns...
Kirk Douglas is competent as the "gentleman caller" but is outclassed by Miss Lawrence, Miss Wyman, and Mr. Kennedy and, whereas in the play the caller was a doltish sort of a fellow putting on an act, he emerges as a bright, slick young man in the screen version. Somehow the original caller was more consistent with Williams' description of the entire work "a picture of a fundamentally enslaved section of American society. . . living in huge buildings always burning with the slow implacable fires of human desperation...