Word: largo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Largo (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by The Playwrights' Company) brought Paul Muni back to Broadway after seven years in Hollywood. It also proved to be Maxwell Anderson's most serious play since Winterset. When Anderson gets really serious, the dilemmas of mankind stiffen their doughty horns, philosophy flaps its aerial wings, Webster's Unabridged donates its longest words, prose ascends to verse, and there is a general intimation that the Almighty is in the throes of mapping out the universe...
...Largo tells of King McCloud (well played by Muni), who deserts the Spanish Loyalists when he sees their cause "betrayed" and doomed, and his own patrol about to be annihilated. To him this is riot cowardice, but the common sense of disillusionment; to his companions it still seems better to die for an ideal than live without one. Afterwards, though still believing he was right, King is burdened with a sense of guilt. The play does not, however (after the fashion of Conrad's Lord Jim), trace out the psychological consequences of King's desertion; instead, it brings...
Despite its grim situations, Key Largo is not realistic drama but a philosophical sweatbox giving the third degree to a question that has agitated every mind from Shakespeare's to the corner grocer's: Is life a mere vicious muddle, or are there things worth dying for? Unfortunately it is a problem not to be solved by all the logarithms of philosophy, but by the simple arithmetic of each individual heart. Anderson is determined to use logarithms. His people look inward, outward, up, down, in prose, in verse, in gestures, in glances, until every word they utter appears...
...sound playwright who long ago wrote What Price Glory? and Saturday's Children has gradually given way to a fuzzy cosmos-gazer. Anderson is the most flatulent and pretentious of U. S. dramatists because he seldom does justice to his grandiose conceptions. The verse of Key Largo will not stand comparison with such contemporary dramatic poetry as T. S. Eliot's or Archibald MacLeish's. So little feeling, indeed, has Anderson for fit words that his people talk like stilted schoolmasters as well as windy poets : a businessman, for example, refers to gangsters as "banditti." Worst...
Miss Hagen said that she considers "Key Largo" Maxwell Anderson's best play to date...