Word: shumlin
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...once belonged to Hitler's youth corps, has been denounced as a pro-Communist and an anti-Semite. U.S. Catholic journals-including the respected Jesuit weekly America-have editorially attacked the play, apparently in hopes of forestalling a Broadway production planned for next February by Producer Herman F. Shumlin, whose last play, Inherit the Wind, was about the trial of a freethinker...
Instead of the hard-paced, sharp-edged direction that Herman Shumlin brought to the play, there is in the film a sluggish, confused manipulation of ideas and players. Instead of Actor Muni there is Spencer Tracy, the Hollywooden archetype of the wise old man, who as the years and pictures go by acts less and less and looks more and more as though he had been carved out of Mount Rushmore. Instead of Ed Begley in the role of Bryan there is Fredric March, who has somehow been persuaded to portray that unbalanced genius of the spoken word...
Aside from its big scene, however, Inherit the Wind loses from being more documentary than creative. It is too journalistic in tone, too diffuse and shapeless in movement. Under Director Herman Shumlin's able supervision, there are plenty of vivid snapshots and plenty of lively moments, but the play provides no sustained drama. And what does seem fictional seems all too much so: a vapid love story between Scopes and a hard-shell preacher's daughter; a Mencken who talks more like a smarty-pants cribbing from the real Mencken's prose. But if Inherit the Wind...
...Herman Shumlin's ability as director is evident in the fact that there are no serious flaws or lapses of pacing in the show. Presumably, too, he will get a touch more animation into Mr. Jourdan's performance. Actually, Samarkand is very near the peculiar, dim excellence of plays that are an unmodified good...
...producing with a brace of French plays: the musical, Orpheus in the Underworld, based on Jacques Offenbach's score and with a new book by Ben Hecht (see Music) ; and a dramatization of André Gide's The Immoralist, starring Geraldine Page and directed by Herman Shumlin. Other French entries: The Strong Are Lonely, with Victor Francen and Margaret Webster; and a Louis Kronenberger adaptation of Jean Anouilh's bitter Colombe, a starring vehicle for talented Julie Harris...