Word: janes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Lost Horizons (by Harry Segall and John Hayden; Laurence Rivers, Inc., producers). What a hotel was to Grand Hotel, what a dinner was to Dinner at Eight, Heroine Janet Evans (Jane Wyatt) is to Lost Horizons. In this play the dramatic assembly of heterogeneous people and events begins after she commits suicide because her lover deserts her. In the next scene Janet Evans arrives in a lobby next to Heaven and begins to read the histories of the lives which would have been bound up with hers if she had stayed on earth: a disheartened Kansas City playwright; a female...
...temporal sequence of its 20 scenes, the over-intricate arrangement of the characters. But if Lost Horizons is not likely to be a satisfactory successor to The Green Pastures in Laurence Rivers' (Rowland Stebbins) series of supernatural moralities, it will not be any fault of its leading lady. Jane Wyatt contrives to spill none of its spiritual qualities while adding considerably to its physical appeal...
...succeeds as an actress. Jane Waddington Wyatt will do so at the expense of the hollow tradition that cheap theatrical boarding houses, one-night stands, hardships in stock companies and the pangs of poverty are indispensable incubators of talent. She was born 21 years ago near smart Tuxedo. N. Y. Her upbringing in horsy Dutchess County was well calculated to make her think of the theatre as a place into which nice people do not venture until the middle of the first act. Her first experience in drama was playing Shylock at fashionable Miss Chapin's School in Manhattan...
After a decorous debut party in 1929 and two years at Barnard, Jane Wyatt did her best to conform to the routine for stage beginners by making the round of theatrical offices. The round lasted only until she reached the office of Charles Hopkins who promptly engaged her for an ingenue role in Give Me Yesterday. One season in stock, at the commodious summer theatre in Stockbridge, Mass., a few more appearances in Manhattan, prepared her for Hollywood. In her first picture (One More River), Jane Wyatt performed so well that she got the lead in her second, Great Expectations...
...Gladys Unger and directed by Stuart Walker, the task of preserving the vitality of Great Expectations rests principally on the cast. Most memorable contributions to a gallery of 19th Century human oddities are made by Henry Hull, as monkey-faced Magwitch; Florence Reed, as monstrous old Miss Havisham; Jane Wyatt as cold-hearted Estella. Good shot: Magwitch eating cold porkpie in a graveyard...