Word: lola
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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More impressive than the obvious import of Miss Booth to play Lola is Hal Wallis' choice of Daniel Mann, the director of Sheba on Broadway, to film the screen version. Mann makes William Inge's portrait of frustration and wasted lives even more harrowing on film than it was on the stage. With few close-ups, the camera prowls the squalid little home of the Delaneys like a fascinated eavesdropper. It hides at the bottom of the stairs and catches the plump disarray of Lola as she wanders sleepily down to answer the door-bell; it watches the young boarder...
Miss Booth's performance is, of course, the highlight of the film. A strangely static character, Lola passively reacts to the hell around her but never really comprehends it. With wistful comfort from a distant but remembered past, she plods through the present listlessly, leaving her hair-brush on the breakfast table and her girdle in the bureau. A less gifted actress would make Lola only repulsive, infuriating for her aimless sloppiness, her complete lack of intellect and sensitivity. Miss Booth, however, draws an infinitely pathetic portrait of a lonely and well-meaning, but painfully limited woman unable to cope...
...generally honest and affecting examination of a marriage dying piecemeal from a sort of emotional anemia. The picture is at its best when it owes least to the stage play-in James Wong Howe's evocatively drab photography, and in such scenes of slack and silence as when Lola stands entranced at the kitchen door watching Terry and her athlete boy friend...
...after some twoscore years of success on stage and radio (she was the original Miss Duffy of Duffy's Tavern), auburn-haired Actress Booth, shiftlessly waddling around and prattling away endlessly in a singsong voice, does a highly skillful job of bringing the gabby, good-natured, slatternly Lola to life. For her stage portrayal of Lola, Shirley Booth won five awards (New York Drama Critics Circle, Newspaper Guild, Donaldson, Barter, Antoinette Perry). Her screen characterization may yet win her a sixth: an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar, for which she is already being enthusiastically boomed...
Come Back, Little Sheba (Hal Wallis; Paramount) is a minor but moving tragedy on a major theme: the lives of quiet desperation that men lead. Its central characters are two mismated people: Doc (Burt Lancaster), who was once a promising medical student, and "pretty Lola" (Shirley Booth), who once had lots of beaux. Then Doc got Lola into trouble and had to marry her; their baby died. Now, after 20 years which seems to have "vanished into thin air," Doc is a chiropractor and a reformed drunk, while Lola is "old, fat and sloppy," with nothing on her mind...