Word: lees
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gang's All Here (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee) has the authors of Inherit the Wind once again flipping back in U.S. history to the real life 19203, this time to Warren G. Harding under the name of Griffith P. Hastings. Their portrait is a largely familiar one of a genial poker-playing mediocrity who is hoisted into the White House. His cronies are crooks whom he turns into Cabinet members and on whose strong right claws he leans for support. At the end the authors portray a Harding who commits suicide,* but not until...
Using simple strokes and surefire cliches, always working from the outside out, now shaking their heads over what goes on and now smacking their lips, Playwrights Lawrence and Lee give their play a fair amount of story interest and shock value, while Actor Melvyn Douglas, with a brilliant impersonation, wins sympathy for their hero. But wherever the pull of the play is not purely factual it seems flagrantly fictional, particularly in a weak last act. It brings no insight to any of the questions it raises. It gets beneath none of the skin it flays. Nor does The Gang...
...version of a slight Samson Raphaelson comedy (Accent on Youth) which first appeared on Broadway in 1934, and soon thereafter on the screen. Hollywood has packed a prize cast into the remodeled hull, but the craft is still so frail that only the acting mastery of Lee J. Cobb and Lilli Palmer saves it from capsizing...
...runs to the alcoholic playwright (Lee Cobb), urges him to start rewriting, assaults him with such rancid boffolas as: "Your cough is the illegitimate child of you and those cigarettes." They redo the play in four weeks; the secretary is cast in the female lead, the play is a smash, the girl proposes to Gable in Sardi...
...Gang's All Here. Although the authors (Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee) insist that they have not confined their history to the seamy politics of Warren Gamaliel Harding, no one who remembers the Teapot Dome scandal will feel obliged to believe them. Not that telling the truth is bad theater, but in this case it does not seem to pay. Melvyn Douglas does nobly as the ash-flaked, unbuttoned ex-Senator trying to forget the presidency, an office he neither understands nor is fitted for, and veteran Comedian Bert Wheeler is a natural as his poker-playing sidekick...