Word: show-off
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...SHOW-OFF is George Kelly's comedy of 1924, but it is datelessly entertaining. Its hero (Clayton Corzatte) is a braying, backslapping braggart with the laugh of a hyena and the grandiloquent transparency of a born liar. The actress who commandeers the stage in this APA revival is Helen Hayes in her best role since Queen Victoria...
...movie is a bore. MacMurray dashes around his vast house conducting calisthenic Bible classes, honking at his ambulatory alligators, roughing up his guests with show-off fisticuffs, show-off opera arias, show-off opinions. Singer Tommy Steele as the young family butler does his frenetic best with body English and music-hall mugging to get things off dead center, and Lesley Ann Warren does her maidenly best as Daughter Cordelia having a romance with Angier Duke (John Davidson). But the only bright spots in this Philadelphia story are provided by the English elegance of Gladys Cooper and Greer Garson...
...play has more claim to be called an American classic than The Show-Off. This season's second production of the APA Repertory Company (TIME, Dec. 8) opened in 1924, had 674 performances on Broadway, and has suffered countless amateur versions. It was filmed three times (with Gregory Kelly in 1926, Spencer Tracy in 1934, Red Skelton in 1947). And it was written by the grand old man of the U.S. stage, George Kelly, 80, actor, director, and uncle of the Princess of Monaco...
Into the middle-middle-class Fisher family, bickering affectionately in a comfortable old house in North Philadelphia, comes the Show-Off, one Aubrey Piper, a $32.50-a-week clerk in the Pennsylvania Railroad freight office. A back-slapping braggart with the laugh of a hyena and the implacable euphoria of a lobotomy patient, Aubrey woos and wins the Fishers' younger daughter Amy over the vociferous outrage of the rest of the family. Aubrey does everything wrong-lying with grandiloquent transparency, big-spending his way into debt-and as a husband seems to justify every dire prediction of the fuming...
After 43 years, The Show-Off is still a surprisingly good play, albeit a psychologically dated one; today's audience must suspend its natural inclination to see Aubrey Piper as a sick man rather than merely an irritating dreamer. But Miss Hayes bounces things along with such verve and charm that Dr. Freud is not likely to be missed...