Word: queeg
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Critics will never admit it, and the reader's good sense denies it, but sometimes bad writing is best. Good writing would never have produced Eliza crossing the ice. Scarlet and Rhett. Ivanhoe. Amber, James Bond, Arrowsmith, Queeg's ball bearings, or any of the Bobbsey twins. The best and most enjoyable bad writing ever done by an American is Hemingway's in To Have and Have Not, but when some anthologist pastes together the definitive collection of Great Moments from Bad Novels, he should give a secondary dedication, at least, to Frederic Wakeman...
...current program gives us Miss Hayes and Mr. Evans (both a bit insecure in their lines on opening night) trying vainly to recapture the aura of their 1940 production of Twelfth Night together. It suggests nothing so much as the U.S.S. Caine's Captain Queeg trying to relive his triumphal solution of the bygone cheese theft when a quart of fresh Strawberries was unaccounted for. "Shakespeare Revisited" is Shakespeare recidivous...
...called Tulura. Theirs not to reason why. Theirs but to dream of the bounding main as they stare at the waves in the water-cooler, arid to suffer in silence one of the subtler horrors of war: Lieut. Commander Clinton T. Nash (Fred Clark), a sort of sugar-coated Queeg. This pill is secretly known, to those who have to take him. as "Marblehead" ("And not just because he is bald"). In civilian life Marblehead was a broker (Merrill Lynch, Pierce. Fenner & Beane), and he got himself a direct commission "without the corrupting effect of any intervening naval training...
Perhaps the best performance was turned in by Director Marker as Captain Queeg, although supported by some purple passages in the script. However, the show does begin to pick up in the second act, and perhaps could improve in the remainder...
This is-novelistically-the British reply to The Caine Mutiny. It is a bloodier affair than just getting Queeg off his teetering bridge; some 50 sailors and Royal Marines are wounded, two die in a bloody free-for-all on the decks. The H.M.S. Ulysses is a 5,500-ton light cruiser, "the first completely equipped radar ship in the world," the seeing-eye watchdog of the Murmansk convoy run. Unlike that long-drawn-out, suspenseful business on the Caine, Ulysses' mutiny has already taken place, and this is the story of her glorious "redemption." This being the Royal...