Word: hartman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Their ringmaster is Jan Hartman'60, and in a sense his job is an easy one; it is difficult for an intelligent group of actors to go very far wrong with Waiting for Godot. The play is constructed of a series of savage ironies, with a vein of harsh pessimism running behind it and through it. So long as the ironies and the pessimism emerge, a director can take the play any way he likes, if he moves with intelligence and consistency...
...example, at the end of Act II Vladimir learns that the mysterious Godot has a white beard, and whispers "Christ have mercy upon us." In the recent all Negro production of Godot, Pozzo, who has just left the stage, has a white beard; Hartman's Pozzo does not. Beckett's text admits both devices, and both are effective...
...work, Russell Birdwell, 55, remains the flashiest flack in the business-the man who happily takes credit for inventing Jane Russell, rescuing Norma Shearer from being treated like a superannuated widow, nearly succeeding in making Rumania's ex-King Carol popular. To launch unknown, 25-year-old Diane Hartman (Birdwell calls her 22) in that white silk rig, he has concocted some accompanying ad copy to the effect that Hollywood is empty of female glamour-except, of course, for Diane, who is described thus: "An untamed animal who has learned the art of song, mastered the modern primitive dance...
...seems to have been directing this sort of play since long before nearly anybody was born. In his old age Mr. Abbott has grown permissive towards arm-waving and other forms of over-acting, but nobody can deny that he keeps things fairly lively. Among his hired hands, Paul Hartman is disappointing as the septuxorial playboy, but a tubby gent named John McGiver, playing the foggiest of Mr. Poston's employers, takes up some of the slack by being funny both drunk and sober...
...Matchmaker (Don Hartman; Paramount) is Shirley Booth, and no one can match her when she is on the middle-aged make. Waving her umbrella like a fairy godmother with a poltergeistic wand, she stumbles, rumbles and cannily bumbles her way through the title role of Thornton Wilder's 1956 stage success in a manner that moviegoers with a taste for old-fashioned American farce will have no trouble savoring...