Word: needlessly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...midst, as tutor to a still cheery teen-age daughter, comes a quiet young German, hating the land of which his brutal Nazi father seems a symbol, and eager for a friendly English home. Discerning about the neurotic Harringtons, he-who has known real horror-tries to prevent the needless horror the family is inflicting on itself. But in sounding the alarm bell, he feeds the fire, and soon accusations and recriminations flare up everywhere...
This attitude, needless to say, is unfortunate. For, like Pogo and Andres Segovia, like Li'l Abner and Beet-hoven's Ninth, generosity is a fine and beautiful thing. What is ten dollars? Two long-play records, three first balcony seats, 700-odd cigarettes, two Elsie's meal tickets. If it were not for the awkward business of writing out a check and deciding whether or not to feel magnanimous, the whole charity affair would be quite painless...
...brother-in-law, a nephew and a niece. In they come with their little domestic problems, and out they go; back they come with their headaches or their beatnik poets, and out they go again. Seldom has there been so little action in a play, so many needless people, or such endless talk. But the worst trouble with The Highest Tree is not that it is all talk, but that it is never talk; it is a flow of stilted professorial speech, of editorial-writer rhetoric. "That's not our unilateral decision!" a character announces. His house, Dr. Cornish...
...only significant assets of this sprawling show. For the most part, it gives one the impression that modern artists are sloppy and devoid of imagination. Though such is not the case at all, the till-now reticent benefactors of the Museum of Fine Arts presumably don't know this. Needless to say, the present exhibition is not going to enlighten them...
...Last Angry Man combines some of the finest motion picture effects with many of the worst. Scenes of sheer poetry are juxtaposed with others of outrageous banality; splendid camera work is sometimes ruined by the most needless background music; several beautifully delivered speeches are muted by close-ups on the wrong faces. Only Paul Muni's performance as Dr. Samuel Abelman--the title figure--is consistently good...