Word: mister
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Happy-Go-Unlucky. For more than half the evening Mister Johnson rather recalls The Teahouse of the August Moon, perhaps because Robert Lewis ably directed both plays. There is a like comedy of nationalities, a comparable use of picturesque detail; in one play a needed road is stalled in red tape, in the other it is a needed schoolhouse; in one, an engaging young native sage holds forth, in the other it is an engaging young native duffer. But the difference between the two plays' titles helps explain their enormous eventual difference in tone. Mister Johnson is really, from...
...Mister Johnson (adapted from Joyce Gary's novel by Norman Rosten) is a young West African Negro who has become a British government clerk and yearns to be a full-fledged, "civilized," Christian Briton. But, even in his bumbling and his guile, the sunny-natured, light-fingered, childlike clerk is miles from his models. An orphan of two cultures, he carries a furled umbrella while walking barefoot, with his patent leather pumps hanging about his neck...
...sure, in the thorny matter of getting a road built, it is Mister Johnson who finds the answer-but in so un-British a fashion as to get sacked. Then, in a moment of drunken confusion, he inadvertently kills a storekeeper he is trying to rob, and mercy can find no legal way to season justice...
...bistro, they stumbled on an "oh so typical, hold it a minute please, mister" farmer who seemed furtively stealing a few moments relaxation at one of the sidewalk tables. He took the intrusion with good grace, and began, in fact, to converse with some of the multi-lingual invaders...
...rough manners of the north. Trained as a lawyer, and a member of Parliament since 1935, Karamanlis early showed his mettle. When John Metaxas padlocked Parliament and declared himself dictator, he summoned Karamanlis and offered him a Cabinet post. Karamanlis looked Metaxas squarely in the eye and said: "Mister Premier, all dictatorships contain the sperm of death. They are doomed from the beginning, as will be yours. I think it might be better if you got some .older men to work with you." (Metaxas replied equably: "Young man, I think you're right...