Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...from his family; life on Manhattan's East Side as Ehrich Weiss, son of scholarly Rabbi Mayer Weiss, was not for him. So he studied the memoirs of French Magician Robert Houdin, changed his own name to Houdini, learned a little clumsy sleight of hand, and started to play the dime museums and carnivals that flourished in the late 19th century. He was a flop, and he had to break out of that situation, too. He concentrated on the art of escape itself. Handcuffs, prison cells, the wet-sheet packs of insane asylums, coffins, giant milk cans bolted shut...
...time he was eleven, had his own trio when he was 21. He has since composed (Seleritus, Ahmad's Blues) as well as performed. He did not develop his distinctively understated style until after his conversion, which, he feels, gave him the necessary "inner peace of mind" to play as he does...
...picture of confidence, a Manhattan lawyer named Bill Shea announced formation of a third major league: the Continental, which plans to start play in 1961, has already signed up New York, Houston, Denver, Toronto, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Shea's biggest-problem: getting big-league players. But Congress is strongly pressing the majors to cooperate and Shea is asking for what he loosely terms "ready access" to their manpower pools...
Blue Denim (20th Century-Fox), cut from the same bolt as the Broadway play, is an honest, occasionally touching effort to dramatize what Dylan Thomas called the puny measure of happiness that "time allows . . . Before the children green and golden/ Follow him out of grace." The movie also follows through to treat the children's vast measure of unhappiness after 16-year-old Arthur Bartley and his 15-year-old girl friend Janet fall from grace and into the evil clutches of an abortionist. The fault here seems to lie not so much with the youngsters' incautious lovemaking...
...good intentions of Producer Charles Brackett fail to keep the picture from looking like a rerun of an old Studio One Summer Theater. It is too often stilted, static, unreal, and riddled with tasteless jokes and cliches that would embarrass Helen Trent. It is also awkwardly resolved: the play ended with the girl surviving the abortion-and only then did the walls of noncommunication tumble -but the movie tacks on a climactic chase in the night, in which the boy's father snatches the girl from danger, then gives his son enough money to go off and get married...