Word: faults
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Moon has internal troubles that go much deeper. In the current production, three accomplished actors cannot save, or even for long sustain, the play. Nor is the general effect one of crude mass: it is much more one of sheer dead weight. O'Neill's greatest fault-using too many and too flaccid words-flattens out a story that is at best never intense enough; it evokes, not the shock of living drama, but the ghost of other plays...
...service of the play. Irish Actor Cyril Cusack is richly humorous and yet realistic as Josie's sly, disreputable father. At his best, Franchot Tone is a memorably quiet Jim. Wendy Hiller, not seen on Broadway since The Heiress, again gives a beautiful performance, again raises, through no fault of her own, a small demur. Glowingly vital and magnetic, Actress Hiller could never really quite seem a colorless, mousy heiress, nor seems now an oversized half-freak. Her acting brings some of its most resonant moments to O'Neill's play, but never quite authenticates the plight...
...biggest fault of the film comes from this everybody-has-a-story approach to all the characters. The life histories and present predicaments of each minor character intrude on the main action too much and tend to distract attention from the principals. You leave the theater confused by incidental episodes and uncertain about the director and script writer's purpose. If their purpose was to make a movie exactly life-like by packing it with interesting but irrelevant happenings, they have come dangerously close to succeding. Perhaps the greatest criticism of all cinematographic realists is that they are not selective...
Weston scientists blamed yesterday's tremor on "some breakage in the earth's surface." Leet said that the Northeast has nothing comparable to the celebrated "San Andreas fault," which has been the cause of numerous spectacular earthquakes in the Pacific coast area...
Again the United States delegates will be generally Communist inclined, and again the picture presented by Americans of America will fit the Kremlin image of decadent capitalism. The fault for this condition is on the whole attributable to an unrelentingly unrealistic attitude in the State Department towards conferences sponsored by Communist bloc organizations. The Department fears, in a sense justifiably, that American participation will be exploited for propaganda purposes...