Word: playe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Front Page (Thurs. 8 p.m., ABC). A new series, in the spirit of the Broadway play, starring Cinemactor Dick Powell...
Fortnight ago the I.T.U. and the dailies had come to a tentative agreement. The publishers agreed to boost wages to $99 a week for day work, highest I.T.U. wages in the U.S. To play safe, the papers kept their VariType crews working. Then Woodruff Randolph, I.T.U. president, demanded that the I.T.U. be granted jurisdiction over VariType operators. This would make it impossible for the papers to put out a VariType issue if the printers struck. The papers flatly refused. They had no intention of giving up the first method yet found to counter printers' strikes...
...novel Breakdown; produced by Paul Czinner and C. P. Jaeger) is a very exhaustive, and very exhausting, study of a dipsomaniac. It reveals Ellen Croy, a Manhattan newspaper columnist (Elisabeth Bergner), as a driven soul, harrowed by something in her life which she can neither exorcise nor explain. The play follows her step by step, relationship by relationship-boss (Anthony Ross), husband (Millard Mitchell), old friend (John Carradine)-down into the pit. Then it slowly drags her back into the light...
...case history, Ellen's story is plausibly chronicled and diagnosed. Omitting no details of the disease or minutiae of the therapy, The Cup not only runneth o'er but is several times refilled. Sensational in spots, the play is remarkably dull as a whole. The trouble is that Playwright Paul knows what he is writing about but not how to write about it. His touch is coarse, his method tedious, his tone didactic; the play becomes a kind of Pilgrim's Progress of drink...
Capra made a few passes and presto! 1) much of Lindsay & Grouse's dialogue disappeared, and the cutting edge was flaked off; 2) the gadfly-buzz of the play's action slowed to a snore. To sustain the illusion of interest, Wonder-Worker Capra relied on a blaze of star-power: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Van Johnson, Adolphe Menjou, Angela Lansbury. But Tracy, as in all his recent pictures, lacks fire; Hepburn's affectation of talking like a woman trying simultaneously to steady a loose dental brace sharply limits her range of expression; Johnson, playing a Drew...