Word: isabell
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...EXCHANGE OF JOY (250 pp.)-Isabel Quigly-Harcourt, Brace...
...Died. Isabel Bonner, 47, stage, television and radio actress (Uncle Harry, Omnibus, The Right to Happiness), wife of Playwright Joseph Kramm (The Shrike), 1952 Pulitzer Prizewinner; of cerebral hemorrhage; on the stage of Hollywood's Carthay Circle Theater during the first act of a performance of The Shrike, in which she was playing the title role...
...contrasted 19th century American "innocence" with Old World decadence and guile. Assured, high-mettled Isabel Archer wants ardently to live without knowing too much about life. She rejects the safe and familiar, only to marry a corruptly overcultivated expatriate who wants only her money. The awakening is hideous; but having made her bed of spikes, Isabel sentences herself...
Sliced paper-thin for the stage, and acted in an emotional treble by Cinemactress Jennifer Jones (making her Broadway debut), Isabel seemed largely pushed about by the plot. The whole play was Henry James glimpsed from a train window in the rain; only here or there emerged a recognizable face or voice...
...others succeed to a remarkable degree. Douglas Watson is an affecting Ralph, gentle without being wispy as Isabel's consumptive adorer. Though given no chance to hint at the charm and initial love which wins Isabel's hand, Robert Flemyng's Osmund is to perfection the egoistic tyrant the script prescribes. With Archibald's assist, however, one performance makes all the others seem drab. Cathleen Nesbitt draws from the role of Osmund's vulgar sister a vibrant bitterness which bursts from the genteel monotony of the play. Her acid interpretation, less dilute with silliness than James' conception, gives the lines...