Word: heros
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Whiplash (Warner). The hero of this gory battle royal (Dane Clark) gets tagged on the jaw, slugged with a blackjack, kicked in the head and punched orie-eyed in a boxing bout. Since most of this mauling is done by thugs who work for the husband of his beautiful, frozen-faced girl (Alexis Smith), poor dear Dane suffers without a whimper. Toward the end, there is some talk of sending him off to a hospital to have his head examined-an idea which might have saved a lot of trouble earlier in the story...
...punching bag, is getting the treatment because he wants to rescue Alexis from her sinister mate (Zachary Scott) and retire from bad fights to paint bad pictures. The catch is that the wicked husband is paralyzed from the waist down, and thinks up his villainies in a wheelchair. No hero can sock a man in a wheelchair; no heroine can divorce him. How to get rid of him? Whiplash solves the problem in characteristically brisk and brutal fashion by having him mashed to a pulp, wheelchair & all, by a taxi...
...different kind of hero has appeared in recent European novels. He is a man with a highly developed taste for disaster; he accepts fear as a normal condition and death as less to be feared than the constant flight from it. Usually a disenchanted revolutionary, he feels that only in acts of simple decency can a man retain his humanity. He trusts nothing else...
Such an uneasy fugitive from catastrophe is Shmul Weinstock, hero of London physician Alex Comfort's tight little novel, On This Side Nothing. In dry, sparse sentences Weinstock tells the story of his return to his native North African city the night before its ghetto is cordoned off by the Germans. His narrative, laconic and unsentimental, suggests the quality of life during a war: its urgency and tension, its underside of absurdity...
...tend to make the audience conscious of the translation. Now, is the good? In "Red Gloves," for example, the absence of such twists and literally-translated idiomatic expressions made the play more direct and forceful, the hand of the middle-man not being there. However, a play with a hero such as this Pierre Renault is probably not creditable in the land of Washington and the Cherry Tree. Such people can flourish in foreign soils, and well. But not here. So Mr. Barry has left the play distinctly Gallic...