Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...presenting the clash between psychologist and priest, one of the author's favorite themes, The Living Room makes use of both dialogue and symbolic plot. Barbara Bel Geddes, as Rose Pemberton, plays a young Catholic caught between the demands of her faith and her desire to remain the mistress of a middle-aged psychologist. Attempting to influence her decision are, quite naturally, the psychologist (Michael Goodliffe) and the priest (Walter Fitzgerald...
Ultimately, both religion and psychology fail in their earthly mission, as Rose escapes her dilemna with suicide. In the last scene, however, a philosophical post mortem takes place, in which Greene contrasts the pessimism of the psychologist with the hope of the priest. Reinforcing this contrast is the subordinate theme of the heroine's two maiden aunts. Both Catholics, they have attempted to escape thoughts of death by closing all rooms in which their relatives have died. Presumably, Aunt Teresa's final decision to sleep in the living room where her niece has committed suicide represents Greene's idea...
...since the plot is barely plausible. Greene has added to the difficulty by placing most of his dramatic scenes in one overloaded act. The first part of the second act contains in this order: an hysterical scene between Rose and her aunts, an hysterical scene between Rose and the psychologist's wife, an hysterical scene between Rose and the priest, and finally her suicide...
...does as well as could be expected under the circumstances. For the most part she is the innocent and unaffected girl which Greene intended. Walter Fitzgerald manages to make the priest a sympathetic blend of the wise and ineffectual, and if he seems more deft at both than psychologist Michael Goodliffe, it is probably because Greene has given him the better arguments...
...Princetonians got excited last spring about a psychologist named S. Roy Heath. From the middle of March until June be was a controversial figure around Nassan Hall. But now that he has left the campus for Knox College in Illinois, almost everyone talks about him with restraint, as if the were the symptom of a bad spring that has gone away...