Word: laura
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Comparison is inevitable when a film such as "Laura" is transplanted to the legitimate stage, and, for once, the celluloid version is clearly the superior of the two. The Hollywood production, combining superb acting and photography with fine music, was notable for swift pacing and tense atmosphere--the very characteristics lacking in the "Laura" at the Wilbur. Producer Hunt Stromberg Jr. and author Vera Caspary apparently felt that the theatre presented the opportunity denied by the screen to develop real people complete with libidos, but the play starring Miriam Hopkins, Otto Kruger, and Tom Neal, in no way improves upon...
Bogging down in dialogue midway in the second act, "Laura" stagnates because the characters describe rather than do anything. Otto Kruger's Waldo Lydecker, who, in his own words, "sprang from the womb with an epigram on my lips," is too amusing, turning what should have been a taut mystery into a second rate Phillip Barry drawing room comedy incidentally concerned with murder. "Laura's" John Dalton climax, so successful in the film, is inexplicably greeted by laughs in the play: the change in medium has somehow twisted the playwright's intentions...
Robert P. Fornshell '47--Laura L. Winchell (Katherine Gibbs...
...woods and yellow flowers and of the train. The yellow butterflies flew in at any window, out at any other, and outdoors one of them could keep up with the train, which then seemed to be racing with a butterfly. .. . . Once the [train] stopped in the open fields and Laura saw the engineer ... go out and pick some specially fine goldenrod. . . . Sometimes like a fuzzy caterpillar looking in the cotton was a winding line of thick green willows and cypresses, and when the train crossed this green, running on a loud iron bridge, down its center like a golden mark...
...Author Walworth's characters dramatically bring forth faith in God. The Reverend Job's faith returns when he goes back to work in the slums. Actor Nick Romney finds faith by repulsing Melita's fleshly charms and acting his clergyman's role to perfection. Laura is saved when Henry is struck down by a terrible sickness. Gladys learns the meaning of religion when she goes to Christmas service and "sees" her dead fiancé there, in battle dress...