Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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While the producers of Whiplash seem chiefly interested in illustrating the varied arts of mayhem, they were not able to resist dragging in a little Moral Problem. Clark, the human 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...
...caught a German deserter slipping into a ghetto tunnel. Should he return the soldier to the Germans or hand him over to the Jewish leader, to certain death in either case? Or should he save the deserter's skin? Weinstock stuck by his belief in the immediate human act; he hid the soldier. Later, when the British came, some former concentration-camp prisoners recognized the German deserter as a guard who had shot helpless men. They killed...
...Weinstock right in saving the deserter? Were the former prisoners right in killing him? Author Comfort implies that Weinstock was right, on the ground that an act of human kindness is its own justification and reward. In the end, the harried Weinstock, fearful of being jailed for the deserter's killing, flees the city. Where to? For him it does not matter; "one place [is] as good as another...
...another lyric he expresses his bedrock feeling toward human beings which goes beyond any theory about them...
...Mine," my throat was a little hoarse from laughing, but I had a vague notion that I had been gypped. For the first two acts of the play I thought I was enjoying not only a genuinely laughable piece, but a comedy which was even sounder for recognizing a human problem and treating it with sympathy. But the final resolution is just a magical blend of cajolery and near-fraud that makes Terence Rattigan's "O Mistress Mine" merely another very funny comedy...