Word: hollywooding
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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JEFF LAZARUS Hollywood, Calif...
...Largo (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by The Playwrights' Company) brought Paul Muni back to Broadway after seven years in Hollywood. It also proved to be Maxwell Anderson's most serious play since Winterset. When Anderson gets really serious, the dilemmas of mankind stiffen their doughty horns, philosophy flaps its aerial wings, Webster's Unabridged donates its longest words, prose ascends to verse, and there is a general intimation that the Almighty is in the throes of mapping out the universe...
Tower of London (Universal) solves the problem of what to do next with a popular monster (Boris Karloff), who has already been deranged (The Lost Patrol), mummified (The Mummy), roasted alive (Frankenstein), resurrected (The Son of Frankenstein). Horror-man Karloff is now introduced to one of Hollywood's most accomplished villains (Basil Rathbone) in the cellars of the Tower of London circa 1480. There, amidst moaning victims, clanking chains and chopping blocks, Villain Rathbone (the crookbacked Richard, Duke of Gloucester) shows Monster Karloff (Mord, the club-footed constable of the Tower) how to satisfy an active homicidal mania...
Playwrights from Shakespeare down have been tempted to dramatize King Richard III and the events of his bloody reign. Hollywood has finally succumbed; but with typical Hollywood erudition, emphasis has been shifted from the character of the kind to the horror of his crimes, and the result is a gruesome nightmare of sudden death with but few elements of constructive drama. Basil Rathbone, as the king, happily avoids overacting and creates a reasonably credible character; but the script and the direction are against him. That amiable Englishman, Boris Karloff, is made the center of interest, and the results...
...Eliot Hall has the part of "Mrs. Dean" in this socially- conscious play about war-killed men who refuse to leave the rosy world for a slimy grave. The play was held over when it was produced two years ago in New York, and secured its author a Hollywood contract...