Word: heroic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...deeply shocked by Dr. Vance Chat-tin's attitude ... his "heroic" attempts to save the life of a creature that can be described as a monster, makes me doubt in his and his colleagues' sanity...
Even the fine scene between mother and son is as masculine in its appeal as a trumpet call; it is the cello note, rather than poetry itself, that is absent from the play. Coriolanus is more Roman and less human, more heroic and less tragic than Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra. Yet that is to describe rather than disparage it. Even with faults of production, this Coriolanus, as staged by Cinema Producer John (Julius Caesar) Houseman, makes a procession of graphic scenes. Its greatest weaknesses stem from miscasting. As Coriolanus, Hollywood's Robert Ryan is never large-statured...
With the image of the heroic doctor always in his mind, Angelo tends the sick in one plague-stricken village after an other. "You can see, can't you," he pleads with the terrified villagers, "that I, though I look after the sick and touch them, am not ill? . . .[You] who are afraid and suspicious of everything will die." But Angelo loses faith in the doctor's example when he finds that there is no way to save people from dying. So he teams up for a while with a stouthearted nun and works mightily, washing and laying...
...play concerns a movie to be made about a heroic expedition that cost Explorer Christian Starcross and his men their lives. At odds over the movie project are Starcross' widow (Eva Le Gallienne) and his former mistress (Mary Astor). Their feuding reveals that Star-cross himself was an unscrupulous egomaniac who had knowingly set forth on a phony quest. But his devoted widow insists that the movie be made anyhow -arguing that, in an era of despair, a heroic legend born of a lie counts for more than the actual truth...
Through and around these scenes sweeps Edna Best, wearing a stomacher, a red wig and a putty nose. Though a skilled actress, she is miscast and overplays the vulgarity of her role as she declaims fake-heroic verses, shouts uncomfortably ribald asides, and trails behind her a retinue of hairdressers, manicurists and poets. William Windom and Harry Bannister are effective as youthful and aged incarnations of women-chasers. Superbly costumed by Motley, Colombe is played against Boris Aronson's fine settings-a gauzy, grey-and-golden evocation of the Paris of yesteryear. The language of the Kronenberger adaptation...