Word: undershaft
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...firing line here are two mettlesome protagonists. Barbara Undershaft (Janet Amos), a major in the Salvation Army, proudly marches under its motto of "Blood and Fire" and does the Christian God's goodly work among the poor. Andrew Undershaft (Douglas Campbell), her munitions-tycoon father, marches under the maxim of "money and gunpowder." And yet this merchant of death is an apostle of life. His argument to Barbara is that he feeds and houses his workers so that they can find their souls, while she drugs the poor with a soup-kitchen dole...
...play is less polemical than comedic. It begins .with a family confab in Lady Britomart Undershaft's London town house. Long estranged from Andrew, the haughty lady (Betty Leighton) knows her select social turf, but that's all. Daughter Sarah (Janet Barkhouse) is enamored of a bean-brained fop (Briain Pet-chey) and Barbara is in love with Adolphus Cusins (Tom Kneebone), an impecunious teacher of Greek...
...course of the play, he inherits the proprietorship of six hotels) who displays his acumen by fleecing the Bulgarians during war treaty negotiations, of 50 prisoners of war for 200 flea-ridden horses. This is Bluntschli the mobile mercenary, the modern and disinterested man who, like Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, sells his services to the highest bidder...
...these men participate in what has become the world's fastest-growing business?the arms trade. The contracts they sign in one day could easily exceed a lifetime of sales made by the "merchants of death" of an earlier era, immortalized in Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw's Undershaft, whose credo was "to give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles ... to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, faiths...
...Undershaft spirit rules. When...