Word: hellman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...acts the play is mostly talk-of the supercharged, characterful kind that Playwright Hellman writes. But even intense garrulity does not make the play move. Then in the last act the stage takes fire with the struggle between the German and Rumanian, with Paul Lukas' remarkable portrayal of the German sadly, sensitively explaining why he has been willing to commit murder, why he is determined to martyr himself, if need be, for the anti-Nazi cause. In this scene Lukas certainly gives one of the great performances of recent years. Veteran Actress Lucile Watson is excellent as Lukas...
Watch on the Rhine (produced by Herman Shumlin). Lillian Hellman, No. 1 U.S. woman playwright (The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes), has written an uneven play concerning Naziism, but it is by far the best on the subject to date. There is not a single Nazi in it. It tells of the daughter of a dead American diplomat (Mady Christians), who returns from Europe to her luxurious, flower-filled old home outside Washington, D.C., bringing with her the German engineer (Paul Lukas) she married 20 years before and their three children. Since 1933 her husband has been...
...Communists could count among their allies such names as Granville Hicks, Newton Arvin, Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Matthew Josephson, Kyle Crichton (Robert Forsythe), Malcolm Cowley, Donald Ogden Stewart, Erskine Caldwell, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, John Steinbeck, George Soule, many another...
Sensational murders and scandalous divorce cases PM also avoids, but in spite of this fact, and of the group of intellectuals (Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, et. al.) who assisted at its birth. PM is no high-brow sheet. Publisher Ingersoll declares frankly that it is aimed at the masses and the low-income groups (incomes of $750 to $4,500 a year). For them he provides two pages a day devoted to labor news, union activities and unemployment, also bargains in food and clothing, cartoons by some leftist artists, drawings and photographs of garment workers, Negro scrubwomen, shirt...
...Miss Hellman has increased the ugliness of the play by chiselling each character to the bone. One or two incidents seemed a little more overwhelming than they had to be. Tallulah Bankhead, hungering for the fruits of wealth and waiting for her husband to die, performs to perfection the subtle shifting between cajolery and tyranny. Her two brothers whose ruthlessness is matched only by hers are done to a turn by Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid. Overcoming a tendency to over-act at first, Patricia Collinge is at the end the most convincing (if that is possible) of them...