Word: molnar
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Liliom (by Ferenc Molnar; produced by Vinton Freedley) is still a charming play. Time has done very little to harm it-far less, certainly, than Producer Freedley...
Fragile enough is Molnar's fantasy of a swaggering, restless, ill-tempered barker (Burgess Meredith) who loves an inarticulate servant girl (Ingrid Bergman), marries her, beats her, commits a crime for the sake of the child she is bearing him, dies, is tried in Heaven, sent to Hell for 16 years, then allowed to return to Earth for a day to try to commit a good deed. The play's appeal lies partly in its letting the audience understand perfectly someone who never understands himself at all -who is bad because he is afraid to be good...
...Shop Around the Corner (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) picturizes one of those completely unimportant, highly entertaining, expertly carpentered Hungarian plays which Ferenc Molnar used to turn out by the dozen, which Hollywood does better than it does almost anything else and which Ernst Lubitsch does better than anybody else in Hollywood. Producer-Director Lubitsch, riding high again as a result of his success with Ninotchka, calls this one "a miniature Grand Hotel." But this time the improbable goings-on concern the paternal boss and clerks in the Budapest leather-goods shop of Matuschek (rhymes with hat-to-check...
...House Contain Us (Liveright, $2), a Rumanian prize novel adapted by one Oscar Leonard, is a slick if not sleazy combination of boudoir romance and political satire, might have been influenced by Molnar, Schnitzler, any one of a thousand under-the-pillow French novels...
...Affairs of Maupassant (Panta Films), in presuming to bring to fervent consummation a liaison that was really carried on entirely by mail between Guy de Maupassant and Marie Bashkirtseff, makes Maupassant out something of a popinjay, shows Marie, in the person of Lili Darvas (wife of Ferenc Molnar), as a luscious morsel even when she is dying a Camille-like death...