Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...audience is 50% of the performance." Shirley Booth without an audience is as improbable as an Easter Parade without hats. She prefers to do her stuff before rapt thousands, but will give just as intense a performance for an audience of one. Her first husband, Radio Comedian Ed Gardner, says that Shirley is always acting, on stage and off: "She sincerely believes in her self-cast roles. One day she would be a grande dame nobly giving me my freedom; the next, a contented little housewife singing in her kitchen...
...while Shirley was co-starring with Ralph Bellamy in Tomorrow the World, Ed Gardner came to her dressing room and asked for a divorce. Says her friend, Bill McCaffrey: "This thing came from left field and it floored her. Gardner had another dame." Shirley kept on giving excellent performances, but for months she wandered in a backstage daze. To quiet her nerves, the stage manager sent her to a chiropractor who dabbled in amateur psychoanalysis. Each day, Shirley would get into a one-piece bathing suit, lie on his operating table, and talk. She explains: "His idea was that...
Shirley and Gardner are now good friends ("He comes to all my plays and cries like mad"), and she has met his two sons by his second wife. But when Gardner asked if he could bring his wife backstage to meet Shirley, Shirley said...
After several reels, Gardner kisses Taylor, whereupon Taylor slaps Gardner, which seems bad manners even in frontier Texas. Follow some shooting, riding, burning, and some pallid attempts by the scriptwriters to make the whole affair into a kind of road-company Shane. When at last the end arrives, slow as an old mule across the desert, it brings the funniest movie scene in years: Taylor and Quinn shooting each other dead and dropping to the barroom floor simultaneously, like well-rehearsed ballet dancers. Ride, Vaquero! has some exciting stretches, but Anthony Quinn as the bandit provides the only glimpses...
Vice Squad (Levy and Gardner; United Artists) introduces the stream-of-consciousness technique at the precinct level. What James Joyce did in Ulysses for Leopold Bloom, this picture does for a detective captain. And though a day in the life of a flatfoot does not exactly provide many Joycean transfigurations-especially when the flatfoot is Edward G. Robinson -the film does leave the audience feeling like a thoroughly chewed cigar...