Word: traitors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Traitor (by Herman Wouk; produced by Jed Harris) turns something very much in the news into something very much of the theater. It concerns Professor Allen Carr (Wesley Addy), a brilliant young atomic scientist who feels that the only hope for peace is for the U.S. to share its atomic secrets with the U.S.S.R. Then, reasons the professor, war would prove annihilating for both sides. Carr has begun to pass information along to Communist agents when a U.S. Naval Intelligence squad catches him redhanded. Instead of arresting him as a traitor, they successfully appeal to him as a patriot...
Once it really starts moving, The Traitor is a tense piece of theater, paced and sharpened in Jed Harris' best Broadway manner. It is a vivid spy melodrama in which everything seems a little more ominous for being so much of the moment. It refurbishes old situations with such new gadgets as Geiger counters; it endows standard roles with new wrinkles. The Russian spy (suavely played by John Wengraf) is a cynical worldling whose motive is money, not Marx; the chief intelligence officer (winningly played by Lee Tracy) is a humorously rueful fellow who has a horror of muffing...
...timely subject matter adds interest rather than importance to the play. The Traitor has its serious side: there is some intelligent discussion, and even, in the person of Walter Hampden, a probing professor of philosophy. But as it proceeds, the play becomes more & more a stock thriller, until the tricks of the traitors become indistinguishable from tricks of the trade. Playwright Wouk does little to plumb the presumably complex mind of his young scientist. After giving every indication that Carr is to be the center of a serious drama, the author makes him little more than an instrument...
...Radek went on trial in Moscow as a Trotskyite and traitor against the Soviet Union. He was accused of trying to make a deal with the Nazi Germans to bring about a "new revolution" in Russia. Explaining the failure of his plot in court, Radek made the memorable statement: "We had plenty of professors, but no good murderers." He was sentenced to ten years in jail. His whereabouts since 1947, when he was theoretically released, are unknown. But his policy of "national Bolshevism," in various guises, has become Communist s.o.p. It was not the first or last time that Joseph...
Axis Sally showed no emotion at the verdict, which carries a maximum penalty of death (no traitor has ever been executed in the U.S. for treason against the U.S.), or a minimum of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. But as she left the courtroom she indulged in a final bit of defiant dramatics and daffy reasoning that left newsmen wondering if she really knew what the trial had all been about. Said Traitor Gillars: "I wish those who judge me would be willing to risk their lives for America...