Word: feeblest
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...frustrating and fascinating. A playwright may get his hands on a fresh or exciting theme, but through clumsy craftsmanship, inept direction or an amateurish cast, the stage effect will be fumbled. Conversely, acting skills and staging techniques of a high order will sometimes be lavished on trivia, or the feeblest works of fine playwrights, or plays on tired subjects...
...this is amiably flavorsome matzo-ball soup opera. Gertrude Berg is flawless in her comic timing, wry-arch in gesticulation, a singsong bird of prey who pounces on the feeblest line for a resounding laugh. For wit, there are Jewish folk inflections; for character, stereotypes; for comic insight, racial in-group jokes. Following up on his 1959 hit, A Majority of One, Spigelgass proves that he can bring in greenback gushers without any risky drilling for dramatic art. He is a situation tinker, and his vocation is to be not a playwright but a millionaire...
...hysterectomy. In scenes of bogus dramaturgy, Boss Finley and his children snarl revelations at each other (e.g., he keeps a mistress) that should have been common family knowledge for years. Toward play's end, in a scene made memorable through Actress Page's brilliant use of that feeblest of theatrical inventions, the telephone, Ariadne de Lago learns that Hollywood wants her back. As she departs for future glories, Chance, ex-youth sans hope, awaits the Boss's vengeance...
Saint Joan (Preminger; United Artists) performs, with the greatest of ease, the feat of turning Shaw into pshaw. Given what is probably the master's masterpiece, Producer-Director Otto Preminger (The Man with the Golden Arm) has concluded what is certainly the feeblest of the five films-Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles and the Lion are the others-that have been made from Shaw's plays...
...unfortunate opening for parody offered by the above title is, in this case, unavoidable. Success seems indeed to have spoiled George Axelrod. In his second play, the author of The Seven Year Itch has scraped together a group of stock Hollywood characters, armed them with the feeblest of gags, and had the presumption to try to foist the result on the public as a humorous and slightly meaningful commentary on modern success. The result is not only meaningless, but unfunny...