Word: flavin
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Cross Roads. Martin Flavin's third play of the season, posing a marriage problem among poor college students, developing it hectically, solving it dubiously...
Broken Dishes. Playwright Martin Flavin is lucky in the men chosen to play his heroes. His plays do not need bolstering, but The Criminal Code, one of the most pungent of the season's hits, is undeniably better for the presence of the virtuoso Arthur Byron, and Broken Dishes would certainly suffer by the removal of Donald Meek. It is the venerable story of the henpecked husband who finally revolts against his wife and gleefully dons his rightful, symbolic trousers. This time he is stirred to action by his extraordinarily pretty third daughter (Bette Davis) who wants to marry...
...Criminal Code. Martin Flavin is both lawyer and playwright. (Children of the Moon). Perhaps by intention he has shaped his new drama in 13 scenes, for it is the tale of a luckless boy who obeyed the moral laws but was manacled, body and spirit, by the statutes of man. A lonely newcomer in the city, he took a street-girl to a dance hall, where she was insulted and he accidentally killed the offender. The blunt ritual of the courts sent him to prison for ten years. There, in the cancerous association of evil men, he learned the criminal...
...grim, accumulative ferocity of these events is marred by the introduction of a romance between the prisoner and the warden's daughter. But it would take much more than this to emasculate Mr. Flavin's play. Largely through the gruff eloquence of the high-principled warden, magnificently acted by Arthur Byron, Mr. Flavin damns the tragic system that man has developed to police the race, makes the so-called science of penology seem as hideously false as some black, antiquated alchemy. Russell Hardie conveys every horrific tremor, mental and physical, of the unfortunate youth...
...door. Hugh Wakefield cleverly stutters, gasps, grimaces, after the established manner of approved farce-comedy spouses. Pretty Marion Coakley contributes a vivid piece of work as the unextinguished Hollywood flame in Room 1912. All this is something of a disappointment to theatregoers who remember a previous play of Martin Flavin's, Children Of The Moon. Yet it is as good as the average farce, and cleverly executed from the box-office point of view...