Word: scene
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mood. The dancer's role, whatever its own interest or its catalyst value, somehow obstructs the son and mother story and keeps it from breathing. Into a short play, Inge has further tossed comedy bits involving theater types and neighbor boys, and a farcical bed-hopping drunk scene. As a result, mother and son never get deeply probed, never really come to grips. Something essential, whether cumulative small detail or a big scene, is missing. A climactic moment, such as the mother's refusing her son's deeply felt anniversary gift, half-sacrifices character to plot...
...some of them are almost ridiculously false. ("How did a girl as pretty as you get to be the biggest witch in Hollywood?" a famous actress shrieks at Sheilah. "Only the second biggest," Sheilah purrs back, looking as if she has just said something brilliant.) And scarcely a scene goes right for Director Henry (The Bravados) King. The principals stumble around in patent and sometimes comical confusion. Deborah Kerr is a fine, sensitive actress, but when she tries to play Sheilah as a hard-lipped careerist, she looks like a nice little girl about to say boo to a goose...
...Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). The concluding half of Poland on a Tightrope, filmed on the scene, deals with church-state tension...
...steam-powered first novel, Peyton Place, the sequel bears all the marks of a book whacked together on a long weekend. The original novel required readers interested only in literary privy-peeping to wear out their forefingers spelling through long passages devoted, with some success, to such matters as scene-setting and characterization. Return has little more scene-setting than a limerick, and the characterization is negligible. The meat of the book is as strong-flavored as bear steak-"Jennifer lay awake in the dark, smiling. She touched the welts on her thighs, running her fingers over them hard...
...been more than a year since that modern American morality play, The Ugly American, hit the scene with its less than surprising revelations about State Department boobery abroad. Whatever its literary drawbacks--and they were great--the book did arouse public interest in an important field...