Word: doored
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Closing Door (by Alexander Knox; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is melodrama that raids psychopathology for its thrills. What its door is closing on, with what threatens to be a deafening bang, is the sanity of the hero. Sullen, suspicious, harrowed by dark memories, Vail Trahern (Alexander Knox) can still, after a quieting talk with his wife (Doris Nolan), agree to go to a sanitarium for treatment. Then, thrown off balance again, he runs off, has somebody else turn up at the sanitarium in his name, and steals back home to precipitate a ghastly mess...
Seldom has a melodrama flashed so many tricks of the trade-pianos, radios, telephones, striking clocks, blinking lights, swinging doors, even false statements in the program. Yet The Closing Door is much more seriously written than the usual thriller and is full of clinical detail and therapeutic advice, some of it Freud and some of it scrambled. If this adds to the weight of the play, it only proves, in terms of good melodrama, a dead weight. Toward the end, however, as the adolescent events that poisoned Vail's life emerge simultaneously with the frightful method he took...
Even so, it is a gruesomeness that frays the nerves rather than tingles the spine. The Closing Door is not particularly boring; it's just not much fun. Something unpleasantly oppressive about the play is accentuated by something peculiarly awkward in the playwrighting. Actor Knox, with his very low-keyed but believable performance as Vail, proves Playwright Knox's strongest ally...
Finally, the American National Insurance Co. of Galveston, Hilton's biggest creditor, took over his hotels. But Hilton still kept a foot in the door; American National gave him an $18,000-a-year job running their hotels. Gradually he raised enough cash to get back five of his nine hotels. By 1939 things were going so well that he built the Albuquerque Hilton and was on the move again...
...truck version of its Stratocruiser, now in quantity production in Seattle. The C-97-B will carry more cargo (53,000 Ibs.) higher (30,000 ft), faster (300 m.p.h.) and farther (3,750 mi.) than Tunner asked for, but its largest cargo door is a hair too small for the Army truck. Last week, Boeing engineers were busy designing a new door...