Word: hellman
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...concerns Japan's invasion of China. It was made by Joris Ivens and John Ferno, whose Spanish Earth was the best documentary film of 1937, and whose trip to China last year was financed by screen and literary celebrities like Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett and William Osgood Field. Equipped with an accompanying commentary written by Dudley Nichols and recited by Actor Fredric March, The 400,000,000 sets out to show that China not only deserves to win its war but has a chance to do so, reaches a climax with the Chinese recapture of Taierhchwang...
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...
Packed with drama and feeling, Lillian Hellman's plays meet their grim situations headon. A moralist, not a misanthrope, Playwright Hellman ferrets out evil and malice not to wallow in them but to flay them alive. Witty, sociable, personally far from stern, Lillian Hellman is happiest while lazing through an amphibian summer on an island off Connecticut, with such friends as Dorothy Parker (who suggested the title for The Little Foxes), Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Kober. But today, awake to the troubled world around her, Lillian Hellman loafs seldom. Militantly antifascist, she two years ago spent a month under bombardment...