Word: tales
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Robert Clurman's "First Voyage" is a clumsily conceived and haltingly executed tale of character conflict among four neurotic sailors. Containing a few excellent descriptive passages; it fails generally to get anything across, for psychological drama is fostered by change and development in the characters and mood which here remain static. The motivating secrets with which the men enter upon the scene are still secrets when they leave, and the reader refuses to absorb the mood when he cannot understand its source. This morbid flavor of the 'twenties, without the disillusioned bitterness toward mankind which produced it, is meaningless...
...President asked why. When they had finished telling him how Hopkins was bottlenecking the war effort (many defense policy matters require Hopkins' approval, and he cannot work regularly), the President (according to the tale) said: "O.K., Hopkins will...
Scrawled in blood across the tale of its death was the bitterly familiar tag line of Britain's World War II record: too little and too late. Only a few months ago had the British really begun to equip Hong Kong to meet a growing threat. They sent Canadian and British troops, new supplies and artillery. But when the Japanese struck, Hong Kong was still far from ready. Too many men were there to surrender without battle, too few to do more than add a brave and futile postscript to a colorful century of history...
...revive big-scale, full-throated operetta without knowing how. It seizes on the cobwebs of the oldtime musical instead of the charm. Its lush, long-winded plot, its stilted dialogue, its leering humor have everybody's nostalgia in full retreat before the evening is half over. A tale of New Orleans around 1810, Sunny River tells of the rivalry between a cafe singer (Muriel Angelus) and a society belle (Helen Claire) for a dashing young Creole lawyer (Bob Laurence), runs the gamut of shoddy ruses, noble renunciations, comic duels, gloomy drunks, motherly madams, then smugly pats itself...
...bundle of closet horrors, Angel Street, which played in London under the title Gaslight, has the good old English knack of brewing a thriller in a teacup, of making a Victorian parlor more menacing than an opium den, of giving to gaitered footsteps a carpet-slippery stealth. This spooky tale of London's gaslit era creates suspense, not by keeping the audience in ignorance, but by making it doubt what it knows. It builds up tension, not by hurrying its pace, but by slowing it down to a nerve-racking creep...