Word: gusty
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Dates: during 1952-1952
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There is no mystery to Dial "M". Maurice Evans has married for money, and in his eagerness to collect it, decides to do away with his wife (Gusti Huber). He devises a neat plan and hires a sound fellow to carry it out while he himself is ostentatiously elsewhere. The murder goes off on schedule-except that it's the wife who, with a handy pair of scissors, dispatches the killer. This being only the middle of Act II, a lot more has to happen, and it is the measure of Playwright Knott's resourcefulness that villainy does...
Star of the show is Ni Gusti Raka, twelve. Her big moment comes in the classical Legong, in which she dances in an intricate trio for about five minutes, suddenly breaks off (at home in Bali, this part of the dance might last an hour), trots offstage like any twelve-year-old, and returns with a pair of golden wings to portray the Bird of Evil Omen...
...Gusti Raka and the others soon learned to like their curtain calls. They are also getting used to the U.S. They brought along their own cooks to make sure they would have plenty of homestyle rice and curry; but they have now decided that candy bars and ice cream are also pretty good. They have been to the Radio City Music Hall ("a lot of legs, but no dancing"). And Clown Serog, 58, is getting a longtime wish: a set of false teeth...
...tense moments of writing, in individual scenes, Flight into Egypt becomes vivid and even terrifying. Elia Kazan's direction is forceful, and as the suffering husband & wife, Paul Lukas and Gusti Huber give fine, telling performances. But the play falls far short of significant drama. It clearly concerns not just the plight of refugees, but the question of their always being foreigners, and the corruption that menaces them in a foreign land. Yet even while it interlaces these three themes, the play at bottom rests on none of them; at bottom it is pure domestic drama-the anguished struggle...
Flight into Egypt. At the Colonial. A tense drama about Viennese expatriates struggling to reach America. Paul Lucas and Gusti Huber are excellent in their portrayals of the pride of a husband and the moral decay of a wife...