Word: kenward
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1942-1942
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Written by 35-year-old, Canadian-born Allan Kenward, an M.G.M. director of shorts, Cry Havoc has an all-female cast, tells of volunteer nurses huddled for weeks in a bomb shelter on Bataan. Its minimum of plot deals with the Fifth-Column finaglings of one of them. But Cry Havoc does not need much plot: it points a fierce picture of driving war, provides a grim drama of doomed women...
Playwright Kenward's baker's dozen of women is carefully-perhaps too carefully -varied: a hard-bitten doctor, her tough-as-leather assistant who lives on benzedrine, a hen-brained Southern girl, a vengeful English one, a onetime burlesque queen, a Brooklyn babe, an unconscious Lesbian. Under incessant gunfire, they grow jittery, wisecracking, quarrelsome, valiant. In the last tense scenes, as realistic bombs and anti-aircraft fire literally rock the theater and the audience, the Fifth Columnist holds the other girls at bay with a revolver after the shelter entrance is blocked. At the end the Japs drive...
Pink-cheeked Playwright Kenward has drifted about the West Coast for years, acting, teaching, directing. Visualizing women's role in modern war, he wrote Cry Havoc (the title comes from Julius Caesar: "Cry 'havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war!") nearly three years ago with a different setting, shelved it, rewrote it after Bataan...