Word: melvyn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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. But, reported the Philadelphia Bulletin, it is "a curiously unfocused play." Authors Lawrence...
Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Rerun of one of the brisker shows of last fall. Melvyn Douglas plays a political war-horse returning from retirement to become a special assistant to the President...
Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Judgment at Nurnberg, a dramatic semidocumentary, with Claude Rains, Melvyn Douglas...
...songs and dances that punctuate the destinies of the Boyle family often appear to be crashing the show. Melvyn Douglas kicks up a clog with a couple of cronies in a pub, and suddenly all Dublin floods onstage to sing that he's a Daarlin' Man, and hoist him on its shoulders. The intimate numbers are best. An Agnes de Mille solo, powerfully danced by Juno's doomed son (Tommy Rail), makes a poignant moment out of the life-destroying blight of Ireland's "Troubles." Two lovers' laments, One Kind Word and For Love, affectingly...