Word: gruffness
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Hume Cronyn has a busy night. He plays the double role of gruff, vain Bennett Honey, who sprinkles false dandruff on his toupee, and his boorish brother Curtis, who decorates his living room with animal heads. (The living room, incidentally, is wonderfully bizarre: Ben Edwards' other setting is too.) Cronyn grumbles his way admirably through both parts, and manages to make the Honeys just similar enough to be twins but different enough to be two people...
Offered little in the way of parts, the cast seldom rises above the limitations of the play. The major role of barrister Sir William Robert is played by Francis L. Sullivan, whose pomposity and gruff voice should provide the play with a comic touch. Sir William is indeed pompous, and since Sullivan has a cold his voice is even gruffer than usual, but the playgoer may wait all evening without hearing him speak a genuinely clever line. As the suspect Leonard Vole, Robert Craven creates a peculiarly obnoxious hero, not from bad acting as one might first suspect, but because...
Sure enough, that afternoon just before the fifth form was due to fall out for cadet training (a period that Christopher particularly disliked), Headmaster Miller got the call. "This is Christopher's father," said a gruff voice over the phone. 'My lad has had the good fortune to be left Marlborough College, the prep school at Mill Hill. He would like to go over and have a look at the place. Is that all right with you?" So Christopher had his look, and when he got back to Forest at tea time, the whole student body began buzzing...
...football team takes the field against Yale, his determined promise will be fulfilled. Coming here when Harvard football was at its low ebb, Jordan has rebuilt the entire football organization, and losses by such scores as 47-7 are just a bad memory. Jordan has been sometimes unpleasant, often gruff, always close-mouthed, but he has always been honestly confident...
Sharp-eyed moviegoers will find familiar notes in the retired general's gruff good humor, thinning gray hair, ingenuous smile, and underlying heart of gold. One wonders if Jagger is patterned after Eisenhower or vice-versa...