Word: themes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Studio One: Less a play than a mood piece, The Bend in the Road nonetheless offered some good acting and a grown-up theme: how an elderly minister and his wife adjust to the prospect of sitting out the rest of their lives. Onetime Glamour Boy Franchot Tone, 51, donned whiskers and did his husky-voiced best to play a spry octogenarian fighting the years. Cathleen Nesbitt was fine as his gentle wife. But Playwright John Vlahos never crystallized in a dramatic moment just why the minister surrendered to a tranquil life and moved off to a home...
...students are "more individualistic than anyone would guess," says Amherst Psychologist Robert Birney. "They try to be able to cope with what they can control. They don't worry about what they can't." At Southern Methodist University a discussion group is now engaged in exploring the theme, "I am I." "What this really means," says Coed Annette Robinson, "is, 'Who am I?'-and that's what we're trying to find...
...convincing hero. They endow the show's better scenes with life and laughs, and Playwright Locke has a knack for bright broad lines. But bad hobbles after good, and crude latches onto clever in a shamelessly oversolicitous, never-change-the-subject exploitation of the girl-who-cries-wolf theme. Fair Game not only tosses in every gimmick, it usually tosses it in twice. And it not only spells out every word, it has a resolutely meager vocabulary...
...nature of that revelation is the theme of The Court and the Castle, 16 literary essays based on Rebecca West's Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation lectures at Yale. Author West agrees with Turgenev, who said: "There is not one of us but recognizes in the prince . . . our own characteristics." But the characteristics that men really recognize are neither noble aspirations nor irresoluteness: men see, in fact, their own traits of taint and corruption. Hamlet is stamped with Original Sin. Hamlet cannot be "pure"-nor can mankind. This is the message that people have managed to ignore for three centuries...
...Bluestone's central thesis is that the adapter "looks not to the organic novel whose language is inseparable from its theme, but to characters and incidents which somehow have detached themselves from language, and like the heroes of folk legends, have assumed a mythical life of their own." He is a little extreme in saying that a novel cannot be compared on much the same critical level to the film into which it was made, for the rape of a great novel is not particularly excused by the differences in media...