Word: electras
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Even on the jumbo or Texas-sized map of Texas, the cattle and oil town of Electra (pop. 7,500) is hardly bigger than a fly's off-hind footprint. But to its mayor, a hulking, oil-rich, ex-circus roustabout named T. Leo Moore, Electra is the pearl-handled, goldplated, diamond-studded axle of the universe. When the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway threatened to have its streamlined Texas Zephyr blow through Electra without stopping, Mayor Moore began to paw dirt...
...played by British Actor Leo Genn (recently seen in Mourning Becomes Electra and memorable as the sardonic Lord Constable of France in Henry V), Dr. Kik is the ideal psychoanalyst-patient, handsome, experienced and endowed with a deep, beautiful voice as intricately gentle as a surgeon's hands. He is the perfect Freudian knight and the picture's real hero...
Eugene O'Neill found his Mourning Becomes Electra still a live issue after 17 years: the city fathers of Leipzig (in the Russian zone) closed it because it was "reactionary . . . Western decadence...
Broadway's new Macbeth is far from great tragedy. As Lady Macbeth, Flora Robson (Ladies in Retirement) merely lacks audacity and fascination. As Macbeth, British Cinemactor Michael Redgrave (Mourning Becomes Electra, The Captive Heart) mauls the part and even does something to mar the play. His Macbeth is violent without being intense, neurotic without seeming imaginative; and taking Shakespeare's great lines in slow but unsure fashion, he strangles the poetry...
...major faults of "Mourning Becomes Electra" are its length and its unrelieved intensity. One either takes O'Neill on his own terms or doesn't, but anyone with a glimmer of affection for America's Great Dramatist should enjoy this, his supreme theatrical achievement. It has certainly been provided with the best in direction, photography, and period atmosphere...