Word: misses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Woman," teeters perilously close to the brink of complete bathos for the better part of two hours, but it never quite falls in. Set in the Vienna of 1900, it concerns the lifelong passion of a pretty girl for a rather stupid young composer, played woodenly by Louis Jourdan. Miss Fontaine gazes lovingly at Jourdan while she is a child, and when she has grown up, runs away from home for a romantic one-night spree with him. He subsequently takes a trip, and after he has left, she finds that she is pregnant. Not wishing to hurt...
...years pass, she marries a rich nobleman, and then bumps into Jourdan at the opera. Although the interim is supposed to be nine years, neither Miss Fontaine nor Jourdan have changed at all, so the audience is just as surprised as the heroine that he doesn't remember her. She tries to remind him but he remains buffaloed. Soon thereafter the son dies and, as she feels herself dying too, she pens him a long, long letter...
...feminine leads, now evidently one of the company's strong points, are Margaret Mitchell as Phyllis, Denise Findlay as Iolanthe, and Elia Halman as the Fairy Queen. Miss Mitchell, seen before as Yum-Yum, has a delightfully crystal voice and an acting manner no less charming. Her eighteenth century makeup is excellent, and her innocent, pseudo-proper, very British diction in the spoken dialogue a special attraction of the evening. Miss Findlay is bewitching and demure as the 17-year old mother of the lad of 25, and Miss Halman perfect as the frightening but not really fierce Fairy Queen...
...curious about how bestsellers are put together might profit from a hard look at Peony. Here, in a neat economy package, are crammed all the formula-tested and cliche-ripe ingredients for which book-club members seem to have an insatiable appetite. (Peony, a Literary Guild selection, is Miss Buck's tenth book to hit the jackpot with a major book club...
...Miss Buck relies for throb-appeal on a blend of the Abie's Irish Rose and Cinderella themes. Peony is written in a soggy prose and stilted pidgin that suggest a kind of mimicry of Miss Buck's previous work. Her heroine, pretty Chinese bondmaid Peony, is in the service of a wealthy Jewish family, the Ezras. As such she tends flowers, serves tea, and prepares the bed of her "young master," David Ezra. It will surprise no reader to learn that behind Peony's ornamental exterior beats the passionate heart of a woman wildly in love...