Word: natwicks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Dorothea Natwick in 1923 plays tennis and flirts with a young libertine, falls in love with a stalwart Progressive from Idaho, and decides to marry the scholarly son of a proud Boston family. The Natwicks, far advanced in airy snobbery, give their clever daughter away at a barn party. Seventeen years later Dorothea's beauty is at its height; she presides over half the gracious living in Cambridge and, at its heart, entertains The Little Group of faculty intellectuals...
Candida's scalawag father (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) was often amusing; the prissy Prossy (Mildred Natwick) almost always was. But though Marlon Brando got a measure of individuality into Marchbanks, Shaw's soft-shelled poet seemed once again a wight that never was on sea or land. And Parson Morell (Wesley Addy) was not the man for whom Prossy would have pined or Candida gladly drudged. Candida's choosing him over Marchbanks seemed largely, last week, like choosing the lesser of two evils...
...would have to be handled with theatrical kid gloves. Brecher quite misses the boat. The story appears ridiculous as well as incredible and it is told in lines maudlin beyond imagination. Treated as fragile fancy, the nonsense may have been ingratiating; mugged by Astaire, Frank Morgan, and Mildred Natwick, it is nauseating...
...spectacle of Astairs gracelessly leaping through excessively arty routines, overwhelmed by colossal settings, is hardly peasant. And those who saw Miss Natwick as Madame Arcati in "Blithe Spirit" will not exactly enjoy the Zazu Pitts-ish drivel she must toss to the 35 cent seats...
...genuine manliness and sympathy with stylized sentimentality in perfect proportions; and Makeup Artist Maurice Stedman helps him give his uglier moments a pathos at once living and restrained. Herbert Marshall as the blind musician (Mr. Marshall is certainly Hollywood's No. 1 Man Next Door) and Mildred Natwick as the clairvoyant do their hammy tasks well and from the heart, as befits good craftsmen. The one note of viciously painful reality in the production is the moment when Richard Gaines, as the hero's high-class stepfather, who is visiting the pair's enchanted cottage...