Word: hellman
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Little Foxes (by Lillian Hellman; produced by Herman Shumlin) is the season's most tense and biting drama-as tense and biting as was Playwright Hellman's The Children's Hour. From the Song of Solomon comes the title: "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines. . . ." Study of a rapacious Southern family on the make at the turn of the century, The Little Foxes catches the Hubbards-who by sharp bargaining and hard ways have achieved small-town prosperity-on the point of becoming heel-grinding, big-time industrialists...
Playwright Hellman describes the Hubbards as people who "eat the earth." But she has not made them all of one piece: between the crude short-changer Oscar and his greatly aspiring sister is the difference between a rat and an eagle. Not instinctive, but icily calculating, is their family sense: the same greed which divides them among themselves unites them against others. Ben Hubbard perceives they are less a family than part of a race -a race of sharp-toothed, flourishing little foxes for whom the turning century promises a world of plunder...
With such implacable people Playwright Hellman has dealt implacably, exerting against them a moral pressure to match their own immoral strength. Both the Hubbards and their playwright-inquisitor work at a pitch too relentless for real life. But it is the special nature of the theatre to raise emotions to higher power, somewhat simplifying, somewhat exaggerating, but tremendously intensifying. Playwright Hellman makes her plot crouch, coil, dart like a snake; lets her big scenes turn boldly on melodrama. Melodrama has become a word to frighten nice-nelly playwrights with; but, beyond its own power to excite, it can stir...
Only woman writing powerful dramas on Broadway today is blonde, 33-year-old Lillian Hellman. In 1934 she burst like a bomb over Broadway with her first play, the gripping, scandalous, tragic The Children's Hour. But for years before that New Orleans-born, Manhattan-bred Playwright Hellman had piled up theatrical experience as pressagent and playreader. The Children's Hour was scarcely off on its 20-month run when Lillian Hellman was rushed to Hollywood. There she adapted such cinema hits as The Dark Angel, These Three (the movie version of The Children's Hour), Dead...
...Powell Club who worked on the case besides Bellatti and Gilbert, were John T. Binkley, George B. Lester, Jr., Irvin L. Stephenson, Robert Thrun, and Edward S. Willis. Representing the Simpson-Sayre Club were Wolf and Braucher, William R. Fry, Jr., Philip Goodhelm, Robert K. Greenfield, Gilbert Hellman, Leonard Lesser and John Van Brunt...