Word: menken
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Saint Wench (by John Colton; Helen Menken, producer). Playwright John Colton is the man who wrote The Shanghai Gesture, co-dramatized a William Somerset Maugham story into Rain. Helen Menken of the thin face and beech-leaf hair accomplished emotional successes in Seventh Heaven, The Infinite Shoeblack, The Captive. It is to be recorded with reluctance that Mr. Colton's Saint Wench, acted in and managed by Miss Menken, is an unconscionable bore, a pitiably uninspired piece of stagecraft...
Declared S. Stanwood Menken, board chairman of the National Security League, vociferous foe of Communism: "Everywhere I was told that the Communist Government was strong and its stability equal to any in Europe. Their economic program is being carried out with an idealism and sacrifice of which the American people have no true concept. There are 156,000,000 people in Russia and to ignore their desires, wants and governmental stability is to act the foolish ostrich with its head in the sand...
...Britisher Norman MacOwan which substitutes sentimentalism and pasteboard glamor for the more rugged emphasis of the late great Thomas Carlyle. Actor Leslie Banks is introduced as a penniless Scotsman, living morally and thriftily in the garret of a bordello and studying to be an insurance actuary. Actress Helen Menken is a wan creature who faints on his doorstep. He befriends her to the extent of a bed, a portion of his gruel and the services of a doctor. The backslid daughter of a scholar, she can quote reams of the pious Carlyle, but she compares her own way of life...
Playwright MacOwan's somewhat misapplied earnestness is ably abetted by Actor Banks, whose moral austerity and quirks of personality convincingly reek of heather. Actress Menken's husky voice has always been effective when sober things were being spoken; she still achieves miracles of makeup which make her seem almost beautiful. One of the season's most extraordinary moments occurs when, as a barefoot invalid, she extends her foot toward the audience and spreads and wiggles her toes with astounding flexibility...
...with seventh grade grammar, in Baltimore. Thereafter he studied French literature, sleight-of-hand, farm implements, music. He earned money by the last three. Real success came with his play, The Spider, a Broadway smash in 1927, now playing in Budapest and Paris. His somewhat spiritualized view of Adah Menken is partly explained by his membership in the American Society for Psychic Research...