Word: gambler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wilder sketch, starring Mimi Bowen, is a character study of a mother who is completely devoted to her family. Maeterlinck's play is a satire which features Steve Mandel as Achilles. Gogol's "Gambler," oddly enough, is about a tale spun by a master card shark...
...false to the original in its feeling. The Broadway production was as intimate as a hotfoot; the Goldwyn movie takes a blowtorch full of Eastman Color and stereophonic sound to get the same reaction. More specifically, a couple of the principals do not quite deliver. Brando as the gambler has a nylon slickness and the right occupational crimp around the eyes. He dances, too, in one wonderful piece of mambo-jumbo, with a kind of animal rapture that moviegoers will want to see more of but he sings in a faraway tenor that sometimes tends to be flat...
After months of this, Dostoevsky fell all the way back to Russia, in time to see his wife waste away and die of TB. An ash-blonde, 20-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina, who came to take dictation for The Gambler and Crime and Punishment, stayed on to become the second Mrs. Dostoevsky, and his last and greatest love...
Much of the credit for the triumph must be given to actor Alastair Sim, who plays the double role of the Head-mistress and her gambler brother. Sim is better in the feminine half of his part, for which he assumes a towering wig, a hoarse whisper, and just the right mixture of cowardice and heroism. Joyce Grenfell is almost as funny in her role of a policewoman who looks very much like a horse but walks like an ape. As for the dozen or so of the Bells themselves, they are less expert, but on the whole quite monstrous...
Sergei Prokofiev loved to write operas, but the world did not seem to care for them. His first mature one, Magdalene, was never produced; his second, The Gambler, had one performance in Brussels and then disappeared; the failure of his third, The Love for Three Oranges, in the U.S. in 1921-22 so disappointed