Word: spinsterism
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...Paramount), one of last year's stage hits, is a macabre melodrama of a woman's greed. Like the famed Wendel family, the Van Bretts owe their fortune in Manhattan real estate to a simple maxim: "Never sell." Head of the gloomy house of Van Brett is Spinster Victoria (Mary Morris), a malevolent despot who rules the others with a rod of gold. When her half-brother (Kent Taylor) marries a hospital nurse (Evelyn Venable), Victoria determines that this "upper servant" shall never touch Van Brett money...
...disturbance is cool, assured Mariella (Gladys Cooper) who has married one of the brothers. She responds with rudeness to the spinster sister's rudeness, with love to the love of David (Raymond Massey), the eldest brother. Mariella's husband is smug and blind, but David's wife Judy (Adrianne Allen) sees clearly. Because she likes Mariella, because she loves David and is grateful to him for marrying her, Judy steps under the falling side of a burning barn. Almost mad with resentment, grief and frustration, David strikes crashing discords on the piano, breaks plates. It is Mariella...
...drink now and then, belongs to no church. He married a social worker, had three sons, was divorced and married again. A psychoanalyst told him he was repressed because he had been the middle child in his family, had had little attention. He makes friends easily not only with spinster social workers whom he kids along but with politicians, artists and writers...
...sitting room of the Van Bret mansion of Fifth Avenue in 1910; in this atmosphere, and as an integral part of it, appears Victoria Van Bret; guardian of the Van Bret millions, tyrant of the Van Bret household. Around the commanding presence and warped soul of this queenly spinster revolves a tense drama of hate and fear, swelling in an unvarying crescendo of emotional strain to a brilliant climax in the last scene. "Double Door" is not a great play, but it is one of the most effective utilizations of a single atmosphere to achieve a high degree of emotional...
MURDER OF A MISSING MAN-Arthur M. Chase-Dodd, Mead ($2). With a carload of near-witnesses, including a New York detective, it takes a sharp-eyed little spinster to ferret out both the identity and the murderer of the corpse in the end compartment. The voluble Mr. Goldstein helps...