Word: humes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...characters are so many musical instruments for a rather sophisticated but monotonously scored tone poem. There is a mother (Aline MacMahon) who is pleasantly, parochially country-housish; her once-vigorous brother-in-law who is now just terribly old; her overserious, not very human son (Hume Cronyn), a civil servant who has lost out on the girl who loved him and is losing out on a career. There is the girl herself (Jessica Tandy), now a middle-aging widow who loves him no longer. Devoid of pasts or futures or both, the characters are drowning with the utmost politeness...
...Warning. Price was a believer in parapsychology himself until he read (somewhat belatedly) David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. (Wrote Hume in the first half of the 18th century: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.") Now convinced that there is no scientific basis for ESP (extrasensory perception), Price challenges its champions to put people who claim to read cards at a distance or penetrate into the future to some practical work...
...Rhine and Soal are valid, says Price, they are "of enormous importance . . ." "As scientists." he asks, "what sort of evidence for ESP should we demand?" His answer: "Just one experiment that does not have to be accepted simply on a basis of faith in human honesty." His recommendation: apply Hume's precept with a controlled test before a committee of twelve prominent men, all but one hostile to parapsychology, "so that scientists . . . would be prepared to believe in psi phenomena in preference to believing that the entire committee was dishonest or deluded...
Producer's Showcase (Mon. 8 p.m., NBC). The Fourposter, starring Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy...
...Honeys (by Roald Dahl) tells of despotic, irascible twin brothers (both played by Hume Cronyn) married to pleasant, long-suffering wives. It then tells how the wives (Jessica Tandy and Dorothy Stickney) decide that it would greatly improve matters if they disposed of their husbands. Disposing of them requires a stalled elevator, tainted oyster juice, a skull-bopping with a frozen leg of lamb, and a medicinal drink containing tiger's whiskers; but the ladies are very happily widowed...