Word: truex
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...Hart, produced by Sam H. Harris). One of the high comic themes of American life concerns the nervous city people who want to get back to the soil-but not so far back as to avoid rural electrification. To this thesis Kaufman & Hart now devote their practiced wits. Ernest Truex plays the part of a little man who buys a Pennsylvania farm where Washington supposedly bedded (actually it turns out to have been Benedict Arnold). The acid Jean Dixon is his wife, forced among other pastoral ordeals to watch a well-drilling operation strike successive layers of mud and eventually...
Dudley Digges gives a superb portrait of a stuffy uncle, and there are effective minor players, especially Bobby Readick as a malevolent small boy who is referred to by Mr. Truex as "Huckleberry Capone." But despite the excellent cast, the playwrights' wit fails to explode, merely intermittently sputters. Even Shakespeare came his croppers; presumably Kaufman & Hart are entitled to theirs...
Unfortunately, after the elements had been stirred and let simmer, the residuum didn't quite jell. Ernest Truex as the paterfamilias, Newton Fuller (who always wanted to live in the country) is well chosen, though his reiterated exhortation of "Just smell that air!" brings back memories of Ed Wynn's lisped plaint "I love the woods, I just love the woods." Jean Dixon as the wife is pleasant, but her change of heart just as the mortgage is going to be foreclosed--yes, there is a mortgage--seems slightly less than sincere. The various younger females, the daughter...
...Dawn Powell; Theatre Guild, producer) is a glib little pastiche which ends the Theatre Guild's 16th season, brings minuscule Ernest Truex and fluttery Spring Byington into the organization for the first time. Miss Powell is better known for her novels (She Walks in Beauty) than for her dramatic works (Big Night). And she is pitiably outclassed when compared to such Guild comic artists as S. N. Behrman, Ferenc Molnar and George Bernard Shaw. Although Jig Saw is utterly without significance and woefully short on plot, it abounds in witty if ungermane lines...
...pretty but maturing blonde (Miss Byington, last seen in When Ladies Meet) has for 15 years been kept with quiet dignity by a small and practical Baltimorean (Mr. Truex). Because of her propensity for bestowing her latchkey on attractive strangers ("It's so hard to know what to give a man"), the lady snares dissolute Nathan Gifford (Eliot Cabot). Unhappily, the lady's daughter, fresh from a French convent, decides to get Mr. Gifford for herself. She does. Her mother seeks temporary solace in the familiar arms of her longtime protector...