Word: rattigan
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...easy bit of rewriting. For one thing, Playwright Terence Rattigan's well-made play is actually two well-made plays, each one about an hour long; and Scriptwriter Terence Rattigan, with the collaboration of John Gay, had no real choice but to combine them by a sort of gambler's shuffle-first a scene from one, then a scene from the other-that could scarcely fail to provide some notable examples of non sequitur. Fortunately, the method has also encouraged a good deal of suspense, and introduced a few fetchingly ironic parallels...
Then there was the problem of casting. Rattigan's writing, clever as it was, seemed to Broadway audiences no more than piquant sauce at a histrionic banquet for two of the theater's most exquisitely mannered scenery chewers: Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman, who played all four of the show's principal parts (TIME, Nov. 5, 1956). Obviously, the movie people could not hope to match that, so they set out to do better-by providing their picture with one of the screen's most gifted young directors, Delbert (Bachelor Party) Mann, and with what...
...marvel is that this pride of cinema lions could be confined in one cage without roaring each other down. Director Mann has obviously cracked the whip, but some of the credit also belongs to Author Rattigan, whose script is the very model of a lion act-the exits and entrances precisely timed, the terrors tactfully spaced, the total effect not seriously disturbing but guaranteed to make the customers forget their troubles in the simple animal pleasure of watching someone else...
...Pont Show of the Month (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). If it appeared in the daytime, The Winslow Boy might look like a soap opera, but Terence Rattigan's old school tie has a habit of glowing in the dark; with Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Siobhan McKenna, Rex Thompson, Denholm Elliott...
...cinemas is a pill covered under about sixteen layers of sugar." True, the play was originally intended as a dramatization of the actual case of a well-known British actor with a taste for young men. But the result, watered down though it be, still has a point; and Rattigan, with a sure ear for dialogue, makes it clearly and movingly...