Word: raina
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...technique is overused, and the story becomes confused at times. The plot deals with the fortunes of Guy van Stratten, a tough American smuggler who falls in with Gregory Arkadin, a wealthy but mysterious citizen of the world. Van Stratten's attempt to blackmail the millionaire through his daughter Raina proves unsuccessful, but the American is hired to trace Arkadin's unknown past...
After a long inquiry through the European under-world, van Stratten discovers the criminal background of Arkadin's wealth. He finds, in addition, the real purpose of his mission. The financier, in a mad attempt to hide his past from Raina, wants to eliminate members of his former gang. Soon the investigator becomes the only person left in the way of Arkadin's ambition. Here Welles loses the chance for a dramatically effective ending by killing off Arkadin in a unrealistic...
...that she was there purely for background. So superbly is she unobtrusive, so definitely part of the picture, that one forgets she is the same Lynn Fontanne who was the charming mistress in "Caprice", the flower girl in "Pygmalion", the artist's wife in "The Doctor's Dilemma", and Raina in "Arms...
...this one of his "pleasant," plays, had taken advantage of every possible bit of humor--humor of the broadest sort. He doesn't smile at Raina's medieval fancy about the chivalrous knight who gallops up to the enemy on horseback and kills a hundred men with one stroke of its sword instead the laughs long and loud. In the preface the play he says: "I am not convinced that the world is only held together by force of unanimous, strenuous, eloquent, trumpet tongued lying;" and he goes on to make this statement more emphatic Everybody in the play...
Little can be said of the play that has not been said before. The first act drages a bit at times, but luring the dialogues between Raina and Bluntschli it is thoroughly absorbing. The second act, (with the entrance of that at living bassoon or kettle drum. Ralph Robert as Major Patkoff) becomes brisk, and at times almost beisterous. The third act continues in this vein and ends with everyone happily set and everybody completely exposed "Guy Phillips, not seem to these shores since 1914, was perfectly adapted to the part of Captain, Bluntschli, or I should say, adapted himself...