Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Putting a comedy on stage is a serious business. It costs a good deal of money, and unless the script or the actors are awfully funny nobody will go because there generally aren't even pretty girls to gape at. So someone along the line must have imagined that Justin Sturm was a funny fellow when he wrote One Eye Closed. I cannot imagine...
...other roles are all to some extent casualties of the script. While a few--Warburton, Pansy, Goodwood--are basket cases, even longer parts are challenges to convey in fifty lines a character etched by James in as many pages. Barbara O'Neil's portrayal of the intriguing Serena Merle, ineptly introduced by Archibald, is a major disappointment. While she sails imposingly about the stage, she evokes less "the wisest woman in the world" than the grande dame of Kansas City. Director Jose Quintero, however, must take the blame for allowing one outrageous failure. As Isabel's uncle, Halliwell Hobbes does...
...others succeed to a remarkable degree. Douglas Watson is an affecting Ralph, gentle without being wispy as Isabel's consumptive adorer. Though given no chance to hint at the charm and initial love which wins Isabel's hand, Robert Flemyng's Osmund is to perfection the egoistic tyrant the script prescribes. With Archibald's assist, however, one performance makes all the others seem drab. Cathleen Nesbitt draws from the role of Osmund's vulgar sister a vibrant bitterness which bursts from the genteel monotony of the play. Her acid interpretation, less dilute with silliness than James' conception, gives the lines...
...script puts Father Brown (Alec Guinness) up to his usual trick of bringing a criminal not to the judicial bar but to the communion rail. His prospective proselyte : a famous international crook called Flambeau (Peter Finch). The cunning old fisher of men lets the devil bait the hook-with a pretty widow (Joan Greenwood). Widows, as somebody in the picture remarks, are irresistible because "if you are better than the first [husband], they are grateful, and if you are worse, they are not surprised...
...introducing Ronald Howard (36-year-old son of the late Actor Leslie Howard) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford, grandson of Novelist F. Marion Crawford, as the bumbling Watson. Filmed in London and Paris by Sheldon (Foreign Intrigue) Reynolds, the opening show had a nice period flavor, but the script, written by Reynolds, was inferior to even the feeblest efforts of A. Conan Doyle...