Word: joans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...routine game of ring-around-a-rosy, with many an Indian biting the dust. The action is somewhat confused in this one by a chicken-pox epidemic that serves little purpose except to permit the audience and the hero (Guy Madison) to peek down the blouse of the heroine (Joan Weldon) while she is being vaccinated. The WarnerColor is pretty, too, and in stereophonic sound, the arrows seem to zip alarmingly right past the moviegoer's ear and plunge into the screen...
...Joan Greenwood, a young woman who is always delightful in both voice and appearance, makes Lucasta the most appealing character in the play, and possibly the only human being. In the opening of the second act, the best part of the play from a purely dramatic point of view, she tells Simpkins of her self-hatred and search for security. In Simpkins, she finds the first person who sees her as she wants to be. Whether or not you take Simpkins as Christ, the process of self understanding through rapport with another being is highly emotional and dramatic...
Dead Pigeon by Lenard Kantor is a three-character melodrama that is constructed like a superhighway: the audience is never in any doubt where the play is going; it is beautifully landscaped by Joan Lorring in various stages of undress, and -though everything moves along briskly enough-there is a certain sensation of monotony...
...plot concerns two detectives assigned to guard Joan at a seaside hotel during her 24-hour release from the penitentiary in order to give information to the district attorney about her recently murdered gangster lover. Both detectives are on the gangsters' payroll, but one of them (Lloyd Bridges) falls in love with the girl. The other (James Gregory) is determined to kill her. With this suspenseful situation established in the first five minutes, Playwright Kantor then all but ignores it until the final curtain when the relatively good detective disarms the completely bad one in a technically skillful stage...
...long interval between is filled with an uninspired but dogged probing of the personalities involved. Kantor's wordy persistence is partially rewarded. Joan Lorring emerges as an earnest simpleton who so yearns for freedom that she risks her life in return for a brief holiday from jail. Lloyd Bridges painfully grows in stature from a conniving cop to a man ready to count his world well lost for love. But, as often happens in the theater, it is Villain Gregory with his unrepentant, double-dealing philosophy who comes most alive on the stage: the only unconvincing note...