Word: seems
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After having only seen him on the screen, it is pleasant to learn that Jack Haley is no slouch as a comedian, himself. The skits he appears in do not seem as clever as Miss Lillie's, and one of them--"All Over the Map"--is downright painful. But it is difficult not to like Mr. Haley since he has made such an art of portraying the average man without making him out to be also a jerk. Aside from his inescapable, affability, Mr. Haley can be heard in even the farthest reaches of the theater, whether he's speaking...
...between violin and piano, combines with the many melodies to give a very striking effect. Perhaps the finest moment in the piece comes in the carefully built-up climax of the second movement. Except for a few scattered parts, the writing throughout the Sonata is tight; the piece never seems too long for its contents. My only objection is to some of the bowing effects in the first movement, which don't really seem to belong. The performance by Norma Bertolami Sapp and Joseph Leibovici was extremely competent, although occasionally it seemed as though Mr. Leibovici were merely rattling...
...first of the 19 was written in 1929, the last in 1948, and like the chase-and thriller-books that Writer Greene calls his "entertainments" (The Ministry of Fear, etc.), many of them seem to have been written with his left hand, or written to sell. But Greene is obviously not at ease with the short story; it brings out his second-rate gift for contrivance and cramps his now clearly first-rate gift for dramatizing the lives of the weak-abandoned, as one of his characters puts it, "to the enormities of Free Will...
Saved by Disloyalty. "It does seem to me," says Graham Greene in Why Do I Write? (just published in Britain by Percival Marshall), "that one privilege [the writer] can claim, in common perhaps with" his fellow human beings, but possibly with greater safety, is that of disloyalty ... I belong to a group, the Catholic Church, which would present me with grave problems as a writer if I were not saved by my disloyalty ... There are leaders of the Church who regard literature as a means to one end, edification. That end may be of the highest value, of far higher...
Psychiatrically, the picture appears valid. Although the unusual problems of a neurotic veteran with a guilt complex and an analyst who can't swallow his own pills seem always consistent and never phony, I couldn't help wishing that "Mine Own Executioner" had dug a little deeper into some of the most interesting, though less spectacular cases, that popped up here or there. The picture was designed to create suspense, and it looks like the writers slipped in justification for the tense climax afterwards. The suspense is there all right, but you've seen that part before...