Word: pondered
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ponder Heart (adapted from Eudora Welty's story by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov) puts all its slightly addled eggs in one basket-the basket of charm. Since they are really all Easter eggs to begin with, the thing works out very well. The whole Southern small-town tale of a lovable, eccentric ne'er-do-ill put on trial for murder has a light pastel daffiness about it, a way of making life look delightfully woozy through wrong-prescription rose-colored glasses...
...because Good European Mollet mistrusts the man who killed EDC), and would not be Finance Minister (because Mendès opposes Socialist monetary doctrine). So Mendès accepted the office of Minister of State without Portfolio and went off into a vast chandeliered office, there (Socialists feared) to ponder fresh ways to get back to power. Mendès' newspaper L'Express groused: "This government does not correspond to the great hope aroused." And Catholic Commentator François Mauriac grumbled: "Don't let them think they can count on me any more...
...Ponder Heart belongs to a village idiot who is milked for laughs. The laugh content is perhaps too high, for the sensitive viewer chokes with indignation at the ponderous, and heartless treatment of old Dan Ponder. At the Shubert...
...sense, Greer's acting sums up the spirit of the production: too much of an only partially good thing. Fields and Chodrov have written a funny play but they have sacrificed the chance to make Daniel Ponder into a really appealing or meaningful human being in order to milk him for laughs. Their method is unscrupulous, and the result is not quite satisfactory...
Expressions like "A continuing sort of oneupmanship" LJan. 9] make the average TIME reader backtrack, ponder, and shake or scratch his head. "Oneupmanship" is not even to be found in a golfer's vocabulary...