Word: playe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week the New York Times's amiable Brooks Atkinson turned the other cheek. He paid to put a two-line blurb from his own review into the play's small daily ad in the Times. Before accepting it, the paper's finicky advertising department checked with Anderson, who said, "Why sure, if he wants to pay for it." Next day the Playwrights' Company happily announced: "Atkinson has initiated a welcome trend . . . [We] will welcome similar advertising contributions...
...seemed to Reginald Kell that "there must be some easier way out than engineering." So he took up the clarinet. After one day, because he had once studied violin, he could play a couple of tunes. In ten years, he was a professor of clarinet in the Royal Academy of Music, which later made him a Fellow, "a fate I thought reserved only for respectable musicians, like an organist at St. Paul...
...time, however, the play largely abandons the physical for the metaphysical. The victims come to feel completely alienated from their leader because he has not known, as they have, either the agony of torture or the degradation of being tortured; between captured and captors develops a terrific desire to make the other party feel psychologically defeated; more & more the prisoners of the Vichyites are motivated by pride rather than patriotism. The pity continues to take odd and sudden turns right...
...mind in The Victors-it is as charged with ideas as with harsh melodrama. The fault, in fact, lies just that way-in a too-muchness of everything that becomes a form of melodrama in itself. In piling up too many motives, in piling on too much horror, the play loses its impact. The characters get to be much less human beings than mere Existencils; the ideas lack value because Sartre insists on using them as bombs rather than light bulbs. For all its intellectualism, The Victors is so crammed to the brim with lurid scenes and dated dramaturgy that...
...Review bowed respectfully to Actress de Havilland, to Director Roberto Rossellini for his Paisan (which it called the best film, artistically, of the year), to Actor Walter Huston for his fine performance in Treasure of Sierra Madre, and to his son, Director John Huston, for writing the screen play of the same film...