Word: spells
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After basking during late December in springlike warmth, with lawns still green and rosebushes foolishly budding, the Mississippi Valley and the U.S. East Coast last week got gales and snow and cold waves, and the spell of bad weather swept east as far as Russia. The reason for the turnaround, according to Meteorologist Jerome Namias of the U.S. Weather Bureau: the planetary wind was on holiday during the holidays. Now it is back on its job and trying to make amends...
Unhappily, Williams' story dies with his telling it, for though he weaves a spell he cannot validate a vision. It matters less that noisomely misanthropic symbols keep recurring in his work than that they nowhere seem purgative. With Swiftian ferocity he reveals a Swiftian tormented-ness; and as with Swift, however much he retches, he cannot disgorge.* More culpably, Williams' gift for theatricalism makes the how of Suddenly Last Summer devour the why, turns the horrifying means into an end in itself...
...masculine Pentagon world, McElroy is a man's man: he can be a two-fisted bourbon drinker, barely manages to suppress a lifelong passion for shooting craps, has a short-fuse temper and can use four-letter language that does not spell TIDE. As Defense Secretary he must walk the tightrope between sufficient defense and national extravagance; McElroy's own nature is such that he could, without batting an eye, decide to spend $30 million for Procter & Gamble to buy Clorox, yet at home in Cincinnati he long kept close personal tabs on the amount of gasoline...
...immediate future Indonesia's political fate may well hinge on the ability of 39-year-old General Nasution to win and hold the restless loyalty of the colonels. Some, while nominally accepting orders from Nasution, still feel he is too much under President Sukarno's spell. They claim that it is Sukarno's own political shortsightedness that has put the Communists on the road to becoming the strongest of all political parties in Java...
...cast develops these complex and highly subtle relationships into really powerful theatre. Perhaps the best acting is done by John Heffernan who indeed seems ideal for his role with features and a manner that spell out the intelligent, and yet vulnerable decadence that Sartre had in mind. Rigmore Christiansen does equally well as the Lesbian, matching Heffernan's force at every point. Jane Cronin seems less remarkable than the other two, largely because her role as the "love-object" is more passive. And as a bellboy in Hell, Richard Galvin provides the suitable mixture of insolence and irony...