Word: townes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mikado is filled with strange twists and stranger characters. There is the wandering minstrel who is actually of the royalty, the old maid with an "irresistable right elbow," the axeman who can't stand the thought of head-chopping, and the bureaucrat who fills most every job in town, including officially checking up on his own corruption. This fellow, the Lord High Everything, is the best of the show, delightfully played by Thomas Whitbread. He is perfectly pompous, and his gift of timing makes even mundane lines amusing...
Picnic. William Inge's play about a husky athlete (William Holden) who bounces around a small town like a loose ball, while the ladies (Rosalind Russell, Kim Novak) fumble excitedly for possession (TIME...
Like just about everything Bates has written, The Sleepless Moon is well carpentered, easily written, and well calculated to shorten a train ride or add pleasure to a tall drink. In a small English town, Constance is married to the town grocer, a man so respectable, correct and dull that passion has no chance. His comfortable household runs like a metronome, but his bed has a built-in deepfreeze. Not only does the virginal Constance wait in vain on her wedding night, she waits in vain, period...
Even in staid English provincial circles, nature has a way of filling marital vacuums. Frankie, the goodlooking young piano player at the local cinema, is just brash enough to make a pass at Constance, even though Melford is by now sure to become the next mayor of the town. A kiss on a snowy night, and Constance is done for. Soon she and Frankie are meeting in alleys, in old mills and, come spring, splashing idyllically in secret pools. Melford, no different from other husbands in a like fix, is naturally the last to know. What is more, he does...
...herself from the church tower. What this trite tale of love and death is intended to light up hardly matters. But women may wonder what Novelist Bates means by letting the men off so easily: Melford ends up with a comfortable widower's life, Frankie comes back to town to cad about with not one, but several, fluttery innocents. It's a man's world...