Word: pathe
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Primrose Path (By Robert L. Buckner & Walter Hart; produced by George Abbott). Eccentric families have become common as dirt on the stage. The family in The Primrose Path is not only screwy but scandalous. Overflowing a ramshackle homestead, the Wallaces, except for one unsociable white sheep who insists on being respectable, are a cheerfully depraved clan. Grandma is a gamy old bawd, who in her day plucked most of the primroses along the path. Her married daughter, Emma, is a talented and popular lady of the evening. Her granddaughter, Eva, too young to do anything worse than swear like...
Short on inhibitions, The Primrose Path at its rosiest is all downhill and no brakes. Were all the characters as rowdy and ribald as Grandma, the play would blow the audience into the middle of next year. But the rest of the family, if unconventional, are given to normal moments of joy and sorrow. After mixing Grandma's outrageous antics with her son-in-law's gruesome suicide and her granddaughter's rocky romance, The Primrose Path fails to come off as well as it might. For, though humor and pathos make the best of friends, realism...
Though no acknowledgment of source is made, The Primrose Path strikes many a playgoer as a dramatization of Victoria Lincoln's popular novel, February Hill (1934). First mentioned for production by Sam H. Harris in 1935, the play went unproduced for three years, after a Fall River, Mass, woman, charging that February Hill maligned members of her family, sued Author Lincoln for $100,000. So far the case has not come to trial...
Producer Abbott apparently believes that the impending suit will not affect the play, for the family of February Hill is named Harris and lives in Fall River, whereas the family of The Primrose Path is named Wallace and lives in "a small town near Buffalo...
...Nebraska utility man Mr. Myers interviewed practically threw him out. But back in Wall Street the holding-company financiers who run utilitydom were seeing the handwriting on the wall in Wendell Willkie's losing fight against big TVA. A few judicious telephone calls soon smoothed Mr. Myers' path...