Word: themes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Playing a blackmailer south of the border, Montgomery clips his words and blanks his stares whenever possible. Funny business is the theme, and six grand is the pay-off. A carnival and merry-go-round provide a unique backdrop for the routine slug-fest that Hollywood associates with the underworld; and despite some stereotyped aspects, the story has few lapses. Montgomery dead-pans adequately and playing opposite is Wanda Hendrix who does her best to appear Mexican and inscrutable, providing good contrast for the know-it-all Montgomery...
...Enemy of the People" deals with the root problem of democracy: are the common people, the "popular majority," competent to rule, or should the government be entrusted to the superior few, the intellectual supermen? The theme is alive today as it has never been before, and yet Ibsen's play fails to make it live on the stage...
Bernard Shaw's treatment of the identical theme demonstrates Ibsen's inadequacy. Taking his semifaseist philosophy partially from the Norwegian playwright himself, Shaw builds an effective and convincing argument in "Heartbreak House" and other plays because his technique--his language, ideas, and situations--is bright and sharp enough to carry his doctrine. Ibsen bases his philosophic appeal on a situation that falls flat, on characters that are crude white and blackest black. The language--whether his fault or that of the translator--is so stilted, so drab that it tends to mire the play in a morass of monotony...
...France's half-dozen best living novelists. The publishing house of Holt is currently engaged in bringing out a uniform U.S. edition of all his works,* confident that he will shortly be as highly regarded in the U.S. as in his home country. But the forbidding theme of his novels may scare off many U.S. readers: Mauriac dwells in the gloomy fogs and disasters of moral corruption and puts a bleak emphasis on the wages...
This year's play, from the collective pens of "Speak For Yourself's" writing team of Craig Gilbert '47, William Scuder '48, and Courtney Crandall '46, finds its theme in the effects a supposedly magic elixir can have on the lives and loves of various citizens of Fairhaven, home of a ball team known as the Mudhens...