Word: overmuch
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Uncle Harry (by Thomas Job; produced by Clifford Hayman in association with Lennie Hatten) is a Grade-B thriller-which, in the present sad state of Broadway, makes it one of the notable events of the spring season. Overlengthy dialogue makes the play move too slowly, overmuch plot makes it run too long. With more work (on the author's part) and less play, Uncle Harry might have come closer to being a first-rate psychological thriller; it contains a sound idea, clever characterizations, some skillful writing, and a neatly ironic tone...
...last week the play was anything but newsworthy: it sounded more like a familiar gramophone record about Spain than a vibrant radio voice. It also did not sound overmuch like what Hemingway had written. In Adapter Glazer's hands, it was less a personal memoir of Spain than a general tale of war. There was more drama in it, but more melodrama. Its sexual passion had been transformed into romantic love, its psychological conflicts swollen into moral crises...
Lonely White Sail (Soyuzdetfilm). When the Soviet cinema chooses to rein in its ideological high horse, the result is usually a pleasant canter-like this current importation. Set in Odessa at the time of the abortive 1905 revolt. Lonely White Sail tells amusingly, and without overmuch political single-footing, of the exploits of two venturesome small boys, very like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, in helping a fugitive sailor from the mutinous cruiser Potemkin escape from a police spy. The boyish ease with which they outwit this official indicates that the art of spying has come a long way since...
Stevenson's story is common knowledge. Suffice it to say that Oscar Homolka, as the liquor beridden skipper who lost his ship and his papers while suffering from overmuch tipping of the bottle, is at times excellent and at times downright boring. Barry Fitzgerald, as the disreputable cockney, almost holds the picture up on his own shoulders only to damp it by horribly overacting. Ray Milland and Miss Farmer supply the love interest, but neither get very excited over their emotion; in fact the former does not know how to walk on the screen, let alone act. As a mugger...
Except for Parson Prang, the political characterizations are weak. The none too obvious but nevertheless pertinent implications about the present administration have, of course, been totally disregarded, much to the detriment of the story. And then, too, the dramatic presentation makes overmuch of a buffoon of "Buzz" Windrip...