Word: themes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...escaped convict unable to trap the killer who has framed him becomes lost in a maze of bewildering side issues and incredible coincidences. Taxi drivers, plastic surgeons, small time grifters, and Lauren Bacall flit through the story in a circus parade of confusion that subordinates the basic theme to the point of obscurity. There seems no attempt to produce a graceful transition from seene to seene. Each skit drops down out of thin air, rumbles along to its maximum dramatic intensity, and then slowly sinks over the horizon...
...Druten's first mistake was in trying to write a problem play. His most successful theme, romance, is subordinated to the handy role of a device to keep things moving, while the problem, modern education, pops in and out of the play, and is never resolved or even treated in concrete dramatic terms. Through the irrelevancies and the scenes of simpering young love, the main theme had difficulty holding its own. An aging professor, envious of the love shared by two of his students, tries desperately to come by it vicariously, gloats over one of their captured love letters...
...Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Variations on a theme by James Thurber, featuring Danny Kaye and some elegantly kidded daydreams (TIME...
...Came Poetry. He and the hotel architect had agreed that his theme should be "Sunday in the Alameda" (the city's finest park, opposite the Prado). But Rivera, like his fellow triumvirs of Mexican art, Siqueiros and Orozco, was no man to waste a big hunk of wall on a merely pastoral theme. He had crammed his picture of the Alameda with the villains and heroes, the blood and dreams, of Mexican history. Said he: "Every one of the 148 figures in this mural I have known personally. I've shaken hands with most of them...
...conclusion is that Rodgers and Hammerstein should have made up their minds whether to write their Morality and have it done with or else to strike bravely out with a musical that stuck to the "Allegro" theme and hit its audiences with a new punch. As it is, the team will probably recover its *400,000 investment neatly, but it has muffed a chance to create a dynamic new form instead of some elever, but seattered, effects...