Word: ephron
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...HOWIE, by Phoebe Ephron, moved from Boston to Broadway riding an unplanned gale of publicity: the quiz show scandals. Howie (Albert Salmi) is a hulking ex-deck ape, the kind of guy who knows everything except when to shut up. He finishes his mother-in-law's Double-Crostic, his father-in-law's sentences and the neighbors' bridge bids-in short, the perfect quiz contestant. But when his sister-in-law (Patricia Bosworth) helps con him into going on a quiz show, he refuses $96,000 after he discovers that his opponent has got a fast...
...whole, the film compares favorably with the play. The scriptwriters, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, have added some happy touches of silly business. And though Actress Hepburn tends to wallow in the wake of Shirley Booth, who played the part on Broadway, she never quite sinks in the comic scenes, and in the romantic ones she is light enough to ride the champagne splashes of emotion as if she were going over Niagara in a barrel. Spencer Tracy has one wonderful slapstick scene, and Gig Young does very well with a comic style for which he is much beholden to William...
...Brown, Ray Henderson and the late Buddy de Sylva, the well-known Tin Pan Alley team of the '203. But the story is the story of three other guys: O'Hara just made it up. Furthermore, he made it (with the help of William Bowers and Phoebe Ephron) into pretty much the sort of simpleminded, dimple-kneed doohickey a musicomedy book should...
...movie is based on a sardonic New Yorker article by John McNulty, but Scripters Phoebe and Henry Ephron seem to have leaned more heavily on the comic strip Blondie for their family sequences, and on Damon Runyan for an episode with a Chicago gangster. Director Walter Lang helps out the dialogue with pratfalls and horseplay, but what keeps Jackpot moving briskly to its happy ending is the ingratiating acting of Jimmy Stewart...