Word: lucia
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...Castries, capital of St. Lucia, the Marlin's chattering passengers quickly pass through British customs. They pay a 50?-a-gallon tariff on the French wine in their demijohns, but none on the high-duty Martinique rum hidden in their baskets. Ashore, they barter or sell their wine and rum, then go shopping. St. Lucia has the foodstuffs that bone-poor Martinique has had to do without...
Last fortnight, just as the Marlin was to sail from St. Lucia, a woman screamed that someone had stolen her demijohn. When police went aboard the Marlin, they uncovered hams, butter, soap, cloth, shoes and other contraband. Goods and traffickers were hustled off to the hoosegow. The women pleaded Martinique's hunger, and the police relented. Late in the day they let the Marlin sail, with a warning that next time things would go harder...
Make Way for Lucia (by John van Druten, based on E. F. Benson's novels; produced by the Theatre Guild) tells of a showoff English widow (Isabel Jeans) who settles down for the summer of 1912 in a buzzing English village. Christened Emmeline but always called Lu-chee-a, she also affects gaily soulful garments, ostentatiously moves from the easel to the pianoforte, dabbles in Italian, and occasionally drops into baby talk...
With her, and settling down as her next-door neighbor, has come a dilettantish, old-maidish male (Cyril Ritchard). Against her, from the moment she arrives, is the formidable Miss Mapp, a manhunting, stop-at-nothing Nosey Parker (Catherine Willard). The struggle for primacy between the two women-Lucia's efforts to dethrone Miss Mapp as a tyrant, Miss Mapp's to unmask Lucia as a fraud-produces a series of mock-heroic crescendos and climaxes...
...double exposure of the precious and the provincial, a caricature of manners and a comedy of airs, Make Way for Lucia is as full of gentility and small jabs as an old-fashioned pin cushion. Some of it is pleasant fun; virtually all of it gains from Mr. van Druten's deft and mannerly use of E. F. Benson's yellowing Lucia novels, and from the amusing exaggerations of a capable cast. What cuts down on the fun in Lucia is the too-great sameness of the cutting-up. The fun itself tends to be pretty thin...